Representation Saves Lives

Crows deliver messages. Stories are among the oldest communiqués we share, carrying human experience farther than any one life can travel. Representation Saves Lives asks what becomes possible when we are free to make room for the worlds they carry.

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How Media Representation Saved My Life

Representation has never been about lists and demographics for me. When I was deeply entrenched in a Christian mindset, deluging my mind with apologetics, desperate to save a world I’d been taught was in danger, much because of beliefs and lives that I’d been taught were wrong, I found people in the stories I watched. People that were built from experiences I would never know for myself. People who were in categories I was taught to be wary of and distrust.

They told us media would take us away from god but what I didn’t realize was that the representation in that media, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, was eroding my walls against the world and overcoming my biases, even as I did everything to prevent myself from allowing such empathy into my mind.

I learned to love the world and its individuals as I was slowly but entirely introduced to individual interiorities. It was this perspective that helped me to stand strong in ministry school, seeing the unique vastness of humanity and resisting the world that insisted upon the need to flatten the people within it.

And over time, I learned something seismic.

Stories can break past biases, even deeply cultivated biases, in ways that other means of learning cannot always. Thus began my realization that I wanted to build this project to celebrate and discuss all the ways representation saved my life by changing its trajectory and helping to understand people and myself in ways I had always been taught were dangerous and even evil.

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