Finding Me

by Viola Davis

“Look, I’m always going to be that fifteen-year-old boy whose girlfriend broke up with him. That’s always going to be me. So, who are you?”

It is a powerful memory because it was the first time my spirit and heart were broken.

At the age of twenty-eight, I woke up to the burning fact that my journey and everything I was doing with my life was about healing that eight-year-old girl. That little third grader Viola who I always felt was left defeated, lying prostrate on the ground. I wanted to go back and scream to the eight-year-old me, “Stop running!” I wanted to heal her damage, her isolation. That is, until a therapist a few years ago asked me, “Why are you trying to heal her? I think she was pretty tough. She survived.” It hit me like a ton of bricks. I was speechless. What? No poor “little chocolate” girl from Central Falls? She’s a survivor? He leaned forward as if to tell me the biggest secret, or to solve the biggest obstacle of my existence. “Can you hug her? Can you let her hug YOU?” he asked. “Can you let her be excited about the fifty-three-year-old she is going to become? Can you allow her to squeal with delight at that?”

“That little girl SURVIVED!!!!!!”

It was radical acceptance of my existence without apology and with ownership. I saw that young girl so clearly that day in my therapist’s office. I could hear her saying, You are my home. Let me in.

“You need to have a really clear idea of how you’re going to make it out if you don’t want to be poor for the rest of your life. You have to decide what you want to be. Then you have to work really hard,”

re-creation and reinvention and redefinition became my mission, although I could not have articulated it.

I get to the mountaintop without legs?

I was looking for something or someone to define me. To infuse in me self-love, acceptance. To show me how to live. To show me I was all right.

made my problems seem small. I know they weren’t, but it introduced me to the painful truth that everyone is going through something.

The fear factor was minimized for me. I already knew fear. My dreams were bigger than the fear.

When you are a dark-skin girl, no one simply adores you. They laugh with you, tell you their secrets, treat you like one of the boys . . . but there’s no care given to you, no devotion given to you. The absence of that becomes an erasure.

“May you live long enough to know why you were born.”

But being real and being transparent are two totally different things. Being real is wearing fifteen-dollar shoes and being proud to wear them. Being transparent is saying, “I’m always anxious. I never feel like I fit in. I need help.” I wasn’t transparent.

If there is another pet peeve as a theater major there in the ’80s, it’s this: Educational theater should be just that. College should not operate like a Broadway or regional theater whose main goal is profit. Educational theater is for the training and preparation of the student actor. Its purpose is to give them the tools to be able to operate on a professional level. It’s why we pay tuition. There are and were theater majors who have never done a main stage production. How do you learn if you don’t do?

“Oh, I don’t care, I’m not going to compromise myself artistically, even if I have to live in poverty,” I say, “You’ve never lived in poverty. If you’ve ever been poor, as a child or adult, it’s no joke.”

I just wanted to grow up. I wanted to experience life. I wanted my life to be as expansive as I felt my mind was, my imagination was.

Africa was God’s playground.

“It’s futile to ask why. Instead ask yourself, ‘What did I learn from this?’”

Here’s the truth. If you have a choice between auditioning for a great role over a bad role, you are privileged. That means not only do you have a top agent who can get you in, you are at a level that you would be considered for it.

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.

They have to be the perfect shade of Black; not too dark to be considered ugly, but not too light that you can’t tell that they are Black.

We want to see you strong. We want to see you curse someone out. We want to see you holding a baby. Maybe you can commit a crime. We can see other values in you, but we don’t see your vulnerability and we definitely don’t see you as a woman.

Unfortunately, as portrayed on TV and in film, female sexuality is used to tantalize. The lie that they tell actresses is that it’s liberating, but the truth is that it is rarely specific and character revealing.

My elixir? I’m no longer ashamed of me. I own everything that has ever happened to me. The parts that were a source of shame are actually my warrior fuel.