Finding Me

by Viola Davis

I learned from writer Joseph Campbell that a hero is someone born into a world where they don’t fit in. They are then summoned on a call to an adventure that they are reluctant to take.

What is the adventure? A revolutionary

transformation of self. The final goal is to find the elixir. The magic potion that is the answer to unlocking HER. Then she comes “home” to this ordinary life transforme...

It was radical acceptance of my existence without apology and with ownership.

My journey was like a war movie, where at the end, the hero has been bruised and bloodied, traumatized from witnessing untold amounts of death and destruction, and so damaged that she cannot go back to being the same woman who went to war.

In the words of Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, “The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero.

The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth, or the dreamer of a dream, discovers and assimilates his opposites, his own unsuccessful self, either by swallowing it or by being swallowed.”

“He wanted to experiment on you. He said he was gonna break ya legs to see if they grew straight. But I saw how he was looking at me. I ain’t dumb. He saw that I was poor and Black. I took you from that hospital. That doctor kept sayin, ‘Mrs. Davis, you’re making a big mistake!’ But I told him he wasn’t gonna experiment on my baby. I took you to Miss Cora’s house and she made you some lima bean soup, and you ate the whole bowl and drank a big glass of cold water and that was it.”

The woman I tried so hard not to be was the muse sitting on my shoulder in How to Get Away with Murder.

Abuse elicits so many memories of trauma that embed themselves

into behavior that is hard to shake. It could be something that happened forty years ago, but it remains alive, present.

That fight marked the beginning of my shift. Looking back on that night when I stood up to my dad and wiped up my mom’s blood, I knew

my life would be a fight. And I realized this: I had it in me.

Achieving, becoming “somebody,” became my idea of being alive. I felt that achievement could detox the bad shit. It would detox the poverty. It would detox the fact that I felt less-than, being the only Black family in Central Falls. I could be reborn a successful person.

It was the catalyst or agent that provoked a larger question: “Aren’t I somebody NOW?” What do I have to do to be worthy? That moment, that revelation, was the true beginning to my call to adventure.

But in my mind, no one cares about the conditions in which the unwanted live. You’re invisible, a blame factor that allows the more advantaged to be let off the hook from your misery.

There is an emotional abandonment that comes with poverty and being Black. The weight of generational trauma and having to fight for your basic needs doesn’t leave room for anything else. You just believe you’re the leftovers.

The potency and power of tradition is deep.

But this is the journey! The only weapon I have to blast through it all is forgiveness. It’s giving up all hope of a different past.

There was silence. She didn’t move. It’s ironic that she was sitting in my beautiful kitchen of marble and porcelain, with the subzero refrigerator and high ceilings, and it meant absolutely fucking nothing compared to the largeness of the truth of what was happening. Success pales in comparison to healing. Not just the truth of the abuse but the decision to love, to forgive . . . what I knew the reaction would be . . . which was silence.

There was an expectation of perfectionism without the knowledge of emotional well-being.

What it left in me was confusion. How do I get to the mountaintop without legs? But we constantly push it with kids now and when you’re a poor kid growing up with trauma, no one is equipping you with tools to do “better,” to “make a life.”

Blackness and poverty is brutal. Mix that with being hungry all the damn time and it becomes combustible.

This was a teacher I loved, for whom I stayed after school once and volunteered to clean the chalkboard. She was young and pretty. I felt she liked me. This, unfortunately, was an illusion. I created a phantom to survive.

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.

It wouldn’t occur to me until much later that this moment was not just about shame, value, or protection. It was about inheritance. . . . I was given her blood, her eyes, her survival skills, her pain. My world was a constant train of imprinting.

I didn’t have words to explain our poverty, dysfunction, trauma to Danielle, but I could hold her. I could love her; and that’s it. I didn’t have the tools to protect. I didn’t know that I needed protection and guidance just as much as Danielle. I didn’t know, nor could I admit, that I was broken.

The guys who owned the store tried to calm my mom down by saying, “Ma’am, he does that to all the little girls. It’s not a big deal.” My mom said, “It is a big deal, you motherfuckers,” and then ran out of the store, into the middle of the street, flagged down the police, and identified the old man. “That’s the man. This is what he did with my daughter. I’m pressing charges.” That’s the point where I was summoned. The cops had arrested him, MaMama was cursing him, holding crying Danielle. He didn’t speak English. The only thing the court system did was fine him. My sister got $9 a month for the next few months from the man who molested her. Nine dollars a month. That was the fine. No charges were ever pressed.

She is a reflection of me.

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

Ron stated with so much conviction, “You’re beautiful.” It opened up another space in my world where I actually could be anyone or anything I wanted to be. I could define my world in that space and piggyback to my world, stronger.

After the curtain call, you are left with you.

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

And on top of that, I was intensely shy. I felt alone. Looking back, I see I had more social anxiety than shyness. I felt that who I really was, was not worthy of a reveal. I was terrified every time she had to come out.

was trying to save someone else when I was drowning. One of my regrets is the trauma Danielle had to endure, and my lack of ability in the moment to do anything about it beyond the temporary Band-Aid of that night.

How do you create a show to prove you’re worthy?

Whether you have an education or not, the ugliness of racism comes down like a hammer.

Art has the power to heal the soul.

I had been taught that was drowning me. I heeded the saying, “Stop making love to something that’s killing you.”

“The same time you’re laughing hysterically, your life is falling apart.” It is the definition of living.

Coming from a childhood of trauma I needed a radical transformation. I hadn’t been taught how to navigate the world. I hadn’t been taught what could help me grow or live better. I’d been taught how to run from the world. I’d been taught how to hide and fight. I hadn’t been taught how to love and be still.

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. When I got on my knees and I prayed to God for Julius, I wasn’t just praying for a man. I was praying for a life that I was not taught to live, but for something that I had to learn. That’s what Julius represented.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a different past. They tell you successful therapy is when you have the big discovery that your parents did the best they could with what they were given.

What became apparent to me as he was dying was that we were his dream; his children and grandchildren were his dream. For a whole generation of Black people we were the dream. We were their hope. We were the baton they were passing as they were sinking into the quicksand of racism, poverty, Jim Crow, segregation, injustice, family trauma, and dysfunction.

The purpose of life is to live it.

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.

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.

So I arrived on television in a leading actress role. Please note the word I used to describe Annalise: sexualized. Not sexy. There’s a difference. I hate the word sexy, because sexy is a mask that you put on. It lives in women becoming a symbol of male desirability. It’s not authentic. It’s self-conscious. Sexualized is just another facet of you. It’s a part of your self-actualization, maybe even part of your DNA. Black women who look like me are not usually allowed to be sexualized because “we don’t think you’re attractive.”

And if we don’t think you’re attractive, then you aren’t an innately sexual being, you don’t have any anatomical sexual organs. 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. That view is perpetuated in our culture, and therefore, it metastasizes in our art. It is a lie, one that I have told in my life when I constantly apologized for my looks, by walking differently (I have very flat feet and a bunion I recently got worked on), by trying to make myself look different with wigs and lashes.

Taking off the wig in HTGAWM was my duty to honor Black women by not showing an image that is palatable to the oppressor, to people who have tarnished, punished the image of Black womanhood for so long. It said all of who we are is beautiful. Even our imperfections. With How to Get Away with Murder, I became an artist in the truest sense of the word.