Finding Me

by Viola Davis

The big clots of blood were a constant reminder that I terminated a life, and I absolutely, without question, knew it was a life . . . which I had traded for my own lif...

He said one of his rabbis said, “It’s futile to ask why. Instead ask yourself, ‘What did I learn from this?’”

There is absolutely no way whatsoever to get through this life without scars. No way!!

Anton Chekhov, the great Russian playwright, once said, “The same time you’re laughing hysterically, your life is falling apart.” It is the definition of living.

If you hit big when you’re young and turn down a six-figure salary, You. Are. Privileged. That’s not throwing shade. Hell, anyone would love it if that were their path.

But struggle is defined by not having choices, and the actor who takes the Geico commercial to get their insurance has just as much integrity as someone who doesn’t take it waiting for their Academy Award–winning role.

Life is happening as your career is happening. Stone-cold life. I realized my joy is not just attached to artistic fulfillment, but life fulfillment.

The knee-jerk response is go to the doctor. I would’ve if I had had health insurance. I could go to cheap clinics, but fibroids, anemia, alopecia required comprehensive care.

My other “aha” moment was the power, potency, and life force of the one-two punch of colorism and sexism. Almost every role I auditioned for were drug-addicted mothers.

You begin to adopt the ideology of the “oppressor.” It becomes the key to success.

In finding my way, the great role was not the biggest objective. Waiting tables to make ends meet until that awesome role came along was not the objective. I had to live: that was the objective.

Here’s the truth. If you have a choice between auditioning for a great role over a bad role, you are privileged.

He who has choices has resources.

Luck is an elusive monster who chooses when to come out of its cave to strike and who will be its recipient.

Beware of the actor who says they’ve always turned down work but never made the choice to go do theater for $250 a week to feel fulfilled. Fame is intoxicating.

With this chapter in my life, I didn’t want to dwell on little Viola running away anymore. I wanted to run toward joy, hand in hand with Julius. I wanted to feel alive. I wanted to become . . . me.

My biggest discovery was that you can literally re-create your life. You can redefine it. You don’t have to live in the past. I found that not only did I have fight in me, I had love. By the time we clicked, I had had enough therapy and enough friendship and enough beautiful moments in my life to know what love is and what I wanted my life to feel and look like.

I was also waking up to the hard-core reality that life unexpectedly throws curveballs in your life.

Somehow the story I was telling myself was that I could actually do something that would make my life go exactly as I planned.

Now, I can pick up a script and figure out a way to make it work, even if it’s not fully realized. I can articulate what’s wrong and articulate how to fix it and that’s if they want to fix it. Or maybe they don’t see a problem with it. But I force my hand with every job I get to make the role better.

I love broads. I love authentic, ballsy women who are unapologetic about who they are.

But what did I say about life? It never stops. We always hope that it lands in our favor. At least, that’s how stories play out onscreen. There is living life for pleasure, great moments, and living life waiting for doom and gloom. Life exists somewhere in the middle.

I didn’t care about it being hard, in the same way that I didn’t care about acting being hard. Hard was relative to me.

Growing up food insecure, washing my clothes by hand in cold water the night before I had to go to school, hanging them up and if they were still wet the next morning, wearing those wet clothes even if I’d pissed the bed—everything had been hard for me. I had mastered hard. Now I wanted joy.

remember picking up the book and thinking it was good, but there was a huge disconnect between what white people thought was great and what Black people thought was great. And I’m one of those people.

Every job becomes about the collaborators involved.

He didn’t want that Hollywood look. That was all he needed to say. We ate our asses off.

Everyone had each other’s backs especially because we were in a place shooting a movie that was conjuring up a part of history when that was not happening.

Ghosts of the past were still so palpable. They were another character in the film, not just the landscape of Mississippi, the history we still felt and saw.

Unfortunately, The Help is a movie our culture, our country was not ready for. Jack Nicholson’s quote in A Few Good Men describes it best, “You can’t handle the truth.”

didn’t have a problem playing a maid; I don’t care about someone’s occupation. My misgiving was playing a character who was unexplored.

My other issue was when Aibileen and the others were offered money and we refused it because we were so honorable; we felt it was more important for us to tell the story than take the money. I disagree. We would have taken the money. Being honorable is fantasy. Survival and how it brings out our nature is human.

The fact that they didn’t take the money, the fact that, nowhere in the course of the movie or in private, did they call any of those people a white motherfucker or anything—well, it would be how we would talk in private under those sorts of extreme circumstances.

Two different, even opposing, viewpoints can be aired at the same time.

Criticism of The Help has nothing to do with the people involved in it. It has to do with everything that has gone on, even now, with conscious/unconscious bias and microaggressions. This is the stuff we don’t talk about but is threaded throughout time. I didn’t know that those thoughts, feelings, and messiness weren’t marketable.

The Help best actress nomination has tattooed itself in my mind because there was so much controversy coming at me after playing a maid and for being in a movie where the white gaze was so prevalent. With that nomination, I felt like I was being pitted against one of my favorites, Meryl Streep, for her role in Iron Lady and everyone was saying, “Let’s see who wins.” Very exciting for the audience. Not so much on my end.

I emphasize what I’ve already said: 95 percent of actors do not work and less than 1 percent make $50,000 or more a year.

My Blackness was as much an issue on the stage and screen as it was in my childhood.

I am a dark-skinned woman. Culturally, there is a spoken and unspoken narrative rooted in Jim Crow. It tells us that dark-skinned women are simply not desirable. All the attributes that are attached to being a woman—desirable, vulnerable, needing to be rescued—don’t apply to us. In the past we’ve been used as chattel, fodder for inhumane experimentation, and it has evolved into invisibility. How it plays out in entertainment is that we are relegated to best friends, to strong, loudmouth, sassy lawyers, and doctors.

know it’s just a side effect of what we absorbed from systemic racism, but the bottom line is I absolutely was not the definition of a female lead on television, especially to play a character described by all these adjectives—sexualized, sociopathic, smart.

It is a widely held belief that dark-skinned women just don’t do it for a lot of Black men. It’s a mentality rooted in both racism and misogyny, that you have no value as a woman if you do not turn them on, if you are not desirable to them. It’s ingrained thinking, dictated by oppression.

Why can’t I be sexualized? Why can’t I be vulnerable? Why can’t I have a husband and a boyfriend? Why can’t I be a leading lady? As I continued to ask myself the question Why? I reached a dead end that asked me Why not?

We, dark-skinned women, exist. My mom had me. My mom is dark-skinned. My mom had boyfriends. My mom got married to my dad. My mom had six kids, so she obviously had sex. Someone wanted her. There are 327 million people in this country and only blond, petite, white girls are sexual?

hate the word sexy, because sexy is a mask that you put on. It lives in women becoming a symbol of male desirability.