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"[The representation] was really important to me because I felt a lot of times when stories are focused on a certain tragedy or a traumatic event, we're more familiar with the stories of the people more directly affected, I guess you could say. I couldn't stop thinking about there are hundreds, thousands of these kids who were in school the day this happened, and maybe they didn't lose somebody directly, or they didn't see any of the violence, or they weren't even at school that day! It doesn't matter, but they're living with the fallout of this kind of thing and it affects everybody in such a different way. And it's amazing how some of these young people have turned what's happened to them into incredible change in the world and they were able to become these advocates for gun safety and gun reform, but not everybody is able to do that after experiencing something like that.
I think it was important for me to explore the guilt. I haven't been through something like this, but I certainly have experienced trauma and I don't think I'm inherently the person who's able to right away talk about it or bounce back per se, in a way that some people are able to put on a brave face and be that voice. I feel like there's a lot of guilt and shame surrounding that and I really wanted younger people to be reminded that there shouldn't be any guilt and everybody copes in their own way and it doesn't matter. A lot of people have talked to me about trauma hierarchy after situations like this and really feeling that way at their school. Like well I wasn't in that classroom, so why am I still living with this? Why aren't I okay? And I thought that was really important to explore."
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