“We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky.” - Walter Mosley
Stories change us. If you talk to authors about the stories they write, they will almost always go back to a book they first read as a child. They talk about their favorite scenes. They describe the experience of sitting with the book in their hands, pouring over the words, reading a story that got inside them and changed them – changed the way they thought about the world and what's possible, changed the way they thought about other people, changed the way they thought about themselves and what they could do. These stories shaped something new in them that years – sometimes decades – later helped form the stories they themselves would write.
At I Am Second, we spend our days on stories, in part, because we want to be changed. We want to hear about experiences and ways of navigating the world that are profoundly different from our own, and allow them to expand and deepen our thinking. Everything we do leans into that vision: growing our capacity for love, for empathy and for grace. We created
Conversations, a new I Am
Second video series, where we invite two people with a shared experience to sit across from each other and talk. Sometimes those experiences are uncomfortable, even painful, but, they listen and they are heard. They ask difficult questions. They aren't threatened by the answers. They don't shut down or put up walls. They stay in the conversation and let it create space in them – for healing, forgiveness, and connection.
We created the
Second Edition series because the stories we tell in our films aren't finished. Every one of them is in progress, ongoing just like our own.
Second Edition gives us a chance to sit down with people we've filmed before, discover a new season of their life and hear the things that have challenged them, changed them, made them new.
Today is a new start for the I Am Second blog. It's a new space with a new name that reflects what we hope it can be: a space that doesn't stay the same. A space where we continually refine our thinking, and find nuance and complexity. A space where we aren't afraid to ask questions and dig in deeper, turning over the soil to see what's underneath. A space to talk about the stories we hear and what newness they're starting to shape in us. A space that still holds its history, but isn't threatened by change.
It's our space. And it's yours. This is Second Draft.