Welcome to Rolling Start Media

Dear Reader,

 

I founded Rolling Start Media because I was tired of seeing disability stories told by everyone except us.

 

During the summer of 2019, still firmly in my high school years, I was just beginning to explore my identity as a Disabled woman. The more I looked around, the more I realized that the world wasn’t just physically inaccessible, but socially and culturally inaccessible, too. Disabled people weren’t just excluded from spaces; we were excluded from conversations about our own lives.

 

Desperate to find a space where I fit, in typical Gen-Z form, I turned to the internet – only to find the same tired, oversimplified narratives I had encountered offline. Disabled stories were almost entirely reduced to a tragedy, a source of inspiration, or a punchline. But I knew then, as I know now, that our stories are so much richer, messier, funnier, and more rebellious than that. Where was the Disabled joy? The Disabled weirdness? The anger? The humor?

 

Rolling Start Media was created as a response to this erasure. As a Gen Z-led disability media company, we aim to challenge and expand existing narratives by placing young Disabled creators at the forefront of journalism, cultural critique, and storytelling. Our work is informed by the understanding that disability is not simply a medical condition; it is a sociopolitical identity shaped by intersecting systems of power, historical marginalization, and cultural representation. We are here to challenge the narratives that erase us, complicate the ones that flatten us, and create the ones we actually want to see.

 

Disabled people have always had to adapt, innovate, and rewrite the rules to make space for ourselves. Rolling Start Media is just the next step in that tradition. 

 

We’re already in motion. You coming?
 

Sophia Greene

Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Rolling Start Media