Fragmentos - Year of Yes

When I made my first television show, I did something I felt was perfectly normal: in the twenty-first century, I made the world of the show look the way the world looks. I filled it with people of all hues, genders, backgrounds and sexual orientations. And then I did the most obvious thing possible: I wrote all of them as if they were... people. People of color live three-dimensional lives, have love stories and are not funny sidekicks, clichés or criminals. Women are the heroes, the villains, the badasses, the big dogs. This, I was told over and over, was trailblazing and brave (...)

Diversity! As if there was something unusual about telling stories involving women and people of color and LGBTQ characters on TV. I have a different word: NORMALIZING. I'm normalizing TV. I am making TV look like the world looks. Women, people of color, LGBTQ people equal WAY more than 50 percent of the population. Which means it ain't out of the ordinary. I am making the world of television look NORMAL (...) The goal is that everyone should get to turn on the TV and see someone who looks like them and love like them. And just as importat, everyone should turn on the TV and see someone who doesn't look like them and LOVE like them. Because perhaps then they will learn from them (...)

The message is: mothers, you are such wonderful and good people because you make yourselves smaller because you deny your own needs, because you toil tirelessly in the shadows and no one ever thanks or notices you... This all makes you AMAZING (...) Where is the greeting card that praises the kind of mothers I know? Or better yet, the kind of mother I was raised by? I need a card that says: "Happy Mother's Day to the mom who taught me to be strong, to be powerful, to be independent, to be competitive, to be fiercely myself and fight for what I want" (...)

Because no matter how hard a conversation is, I know that on the other side of that difficult conversation lies peace. Knowledge. An answer is delivered. Character is revealed. Truces are formed. Missunderstandings are resolved. Freedom lies across the field of the difficult conversation. And the more difficult the conversation, the greater the freedom (...)

We all spend our lives kicking the crap out of ourselves for not being this way or that way, not having this thing or that thing, not being like this person or that person. For not living up to some standard we think applies across the board to all of us (...) I think we believe that happiness lies in following the same list of rules. In being more like everyone else. That? Is wrong. There is no list of rules (...)

Year of Yes - Shonda Rimes