Switching Places: How Freakier Friday Helped Me Redefine Myself as a Writer 

Ever feel like you are in the wrong place in life? Your life is going well, and you have a solid career, a home … but something is not quite right. Seeing Freakier Friday was kind of like that too - familiar characters, feel and heart, but something was not quite right. The 2025 release of Freakier Friday arrived in the middle of a year when I was questioning how I saw myself and while the characters in the film woke up in someone else’s body, I was still in my own skin, but everything felt different. It was as if I had swapped lives with the version of myself I’d always been afraid to claim: the writer.

I’d spent years being a mother and following the passions of my kids. I wouldn’t have changed a thing, but faced with adult children who no longer needed me like they had in the past (though I still remain an irritating presence in their lives), it was time for me to figure out what my passions were. Who was I now that the heavy lifting of motherhood was changing to more of a supporting role?

I’d explored hobbies before that were fun and creative, but it was only when I tried my hand at writing again that it felt like a warm invitation from an old friend. I’ve always loved to write, but over the past several years, I’d been writing more and taking part in community literary events with some success , but for 2025, something changed. Something freaky.

It was the year I stopped waiting for someone to tell me I was allowed to be a writer. 2025 found me dedicated to the craft. I found my way back to a love of theatre and movies and began writing, rewriting, producing, staging, submitting, polishing, and pushing my work out into the world. Like in the movie, the transformation isn’t just about what’s on the outside, but rather it comes when you fix the inside and it comes from doing the work.

Watching the characters in the movie struggle with universal fears and necessary growth feels remarkably similar to how I wondered about a scene or whether an audience will like it. And like them, I learned this year that growth doesn’t come easy. It looks like multiple drafts, notes in a script, late nights, early mornings, and the occasional moment where you wonder if you’re completely out of your depth - or in Hollywood magic, it can look like wearing your mom’s clothes as you try to get back to your own life.

So I chased new ideas, trusted my voice, created opportunities, and found myself in rehearsal rooms hearing actors bring my words to life. I watched as dialogue that once lived only in my head echoed across a stage. It’s electric, surreal, and addictive in the best way.

This summer, a one-act play I wrote called Suds was staged locally and it was insane to hear people laugh and applaud and enjoy what I’d written was surreal. In February and March, I have another play, The Specials, coming to the stage in the lower mainland of BC and ironically, like the first Freaky Friday (2003), a restaurant plays a pivotal role. My play is set in an Italian restaurant where an anxious, struggling man who finds himself unable to cope with eating alone, inserts himself into the dinner of another lone diner, setting off a sometimes-funny but always complicated friendship. This year also brought me recognition for my screenplays in various film festivals and perhaps most wonderfully, I submitted a full screenplay to a production company at their request and it almost doesn’t matter if they decide to buy it, just the fact they requested to review it was a win (but don’t tell them I said that, I’d really like them to buy it). Perhaps there’s a day somewhere in the future where someone on this platform is writing about a movie I wrote. Now THAT would be freaky!

Like the characters in Freakier Friday, making life work doesn’t always start with confidence in who you are. I suffer from a ridiculous amount of imposter syndrome and I don’t know if it’s stubbornness, curiosity, or the simple urge to see if I can do it, but like Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan in the movie, I just keep going. And like them, that’s the story of my year: I tried, I leapt, I created, and I grew. This new me typed without hesitation, rewrote without fear, and allowed her stories to step out from the safety of quiet drafts into stage lights and theatre seats.

I am reminded that reinvention is rarely graceful. Like the characters fumbling through each other’s routines, I also fumbled - a lot - but I also learned to talk about my work without apologizing. I learned how to listen to feedback without shrinking. I learned to attach my name, politely but audaciously, to the words I created. One day I was “trying to be a writer,” and the next I was someone with her name on a program that was being read by a live audience. Somewhere in that transition, the old version of me started to feel like a stranger. The self who had spent years saying, “maybe one day,” was replaced by the self who said, “you know what, we are going to do that and it’s going to be incredible!”

And just like the film, where everyone lands back in their own bodies but forever changed, I’ve landed back in mine with a new understanding: I am not “trying” to be a writer. I am one. Not because someone told me. Not because a producer noticed me. Not even because my work appeared on a stage.But because I finally inhabit the life I used to imagine.

Freaky Friday shows that identity is not fixed, but rather it’s something we can step into. This year, I stepped into mine. I redefined myself. I put my stories in the world, and the world didn’t collapse - it expanded. And the best part? Unlike the characters in the movie, I’m not switching back.