On storytellers and their (apparently) invisible audience. (also called Dr Selflove or how I learned to stop accepting silence and thus love the world.)

I often think about that Goethe quote “We can only see what we know”. It´s certainly true in fields like medicine and pathology (which is where I first encountered it), but I found it really resonated with me once I applied it to representation in popular culture. I remember growing up, and that sense of fear due to never knowing if there really was a ground beneath me.

 It´s funny. I was the happiest of kids, and a brave one as far as asserting my identity went. I knew who I was, but I didn´t know what I was, and THAT was the reason I always felt like I was living on borrowed time, as if one day I would wake up and be *told* I couldn´t have that life. And that would have meant the end, the utter end, because I knew if I were to ever be it could only be as who I was (already, then and now).

How incredibly, incredibly vile that I didn´t even know that yes, people could be like I was, that it was a real thing in the world, that *I* was an option.

Have you ever heard Johnny Rzeznik´s song “I´m still here” in the “Treasure Planet” movie? There´s a line that says “they can´t break me, as long as I know who I am”.

I never let myself be bullied into changing my gender identity or romantic attraction compass despite many, many attempts, but still, that line. That line. When I knew, when I found out there was a LGBTQIA community in the world, that was when I knew I could really move forward, that my life was indeed my life, that I would never have to cede it to an automated intruder.

All kids deserve that. All kids deserve that feeling as soon as they can have feelings. When I hear the infamous wail “but what about the children”, I hit the boiling point, and I hurt remembering the little kid I was, who was always maybe fearing in the back of their mind that SOME FORCE would come and take their life away. Not my toys, my life. Who we are (who we decide to be, who we built ourselves to be) IS our life.

Visibility in pop culture is literally a matter of life and death. Isolation as a kid brings such a powerful, insidious devastation. It saps your heart´s strength if the loneliness becomes too pronounced. So many kids, so many people have been the loneliest people in the world.

There´s a moment in the manga “Dragon Quest” where the heroes are trying to determine what sacred attribute belongs to whom. There are 5 attributes, and strength is not nominally amongst them, interestingly. But during this arc, there´s a quote about who is really strong. You´d think at first that the main hero, a young powerful boy named Dai, would be the one hinted at. But no, the one who really stands for that value is actually the princess Leona, a mage and healer who actually has the most spine of anyone in the team, never loses her moral sense of direction, often refocuses the heroes team´s fight against evil and whose unbreakable will is born from a daunting determination to protect her people. Her attribute is justice, and it´s the reason she´s the one who embodies strength, and that struck me deeply. And then one da, on a black womanist blog, I found the words “Our heritage is our power”, that originated in the book “Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spitituality”.

That is exactly it. Knowing who are the ones that came before you, and to whom you owe so much, and knowing there will be others after you who will be a part of you infuses you with such responsibility, with such power, and with such awe, with such hope, with such perseverance, that you finally feel at peace with your place in the struggle. Knowing you´re standing on the shoulders of giants (because there´s ALWAYS someone who was there before, and we can kind of imagine how hard it was then) makes you stand taller, makes you stand more firmly against injustice, so that maybe one day those who come later stand tall on your shoulders.

The fact that popular culture rarely shows any diversity? The fact that so many people have to fight for scraps so that they can appear every once in a while, as tokens? The fact that our stories are never ever told in a way in which everyone can see them? It effectively cuts us off from our place in history, our place in humanity, our community and our destiny, rendering us directionless like swans without their wings, flailing around in the hopes they´ll somehow find water.

Stories don´t only tell fiction, they also build truths. There are countless trans* kids like me, queer kids like me, and poor and black and foreign and happily fat and deaf and Vietnamese and in divorced households and second-generation immigrant kids that need stories about them so they can consolidate the truths they see in themselves. What about the children, indeed. The real tragedy about giving bigoted opinions a legitimate platform is that it necessitates delegitimizing the existence of the people stigmatized by prejudice. You can´t give equal respect to both groups, unequivocally.

Existing publically is a right, and human rights are also human duties, a wonderful expression I recently ran across (I can´t remember where, unfortunately). In artistic endeavours, that duty belongs to every storyteller.

And for those actors, writers or showrunners who refuse to unapologetically include us in their works, they don´t get to pretend they´re on the good side. They´re building brick walls of silence around the hearts of those who most need stories to believe in themselves and in the world. I was that kid for whom the most sacred of wonders would not have been discovering that unicorns and sentient robots were real, but that I was. That I was allowed to exist as I was and revel in the joy of it.