Finding Me

by Viola Davis

“I’ll get you the VHS tape.”

“Yeah, thanks, but I don’t have the $15 application fee.” “Viola, I will get you a $15 waiver for the application fee.”

“You’ve run out of excuses.”

Free from the chains of my excuses, I was handling my business and exercising my agency, instead of sitting around doing nothing. And claiming that agency was a win in and of itself.

“You have been chosen to come to Miami, Florida, for the Arts Recognition and Talent Search competition.”

I was frozen. Silent.

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.

I was named a Promising Young Artist and was lauded at City Hall once I got home. It was a big deal in Central Falls even though I didn’t win any scholarship money.

I was so excited to leave home. I worked for it and earned it. And once I arrived, I unpacked, settled in, and proceeded to fall into a deep, deep depression, probably the deepest depression I’ve ever experienced.

I was depressed about being away from my little sister, Danielle, but that separation alone didn’t fully explain its depths.

Something inside me, however, must have had different ideas, because I fell deep and hard into a major sadness. It was a depression about trading in my dream.

Danielle would be so happy. She would run out to us like Celie did in The Color Purple when she saw her sister Nettie. That reaction when you miss someone so much, and finally they’re right in front of you. We would eat and watch Fantasy Island or The Love Boat.

I love them dearly, but I didn’t want to live a life of poverty, alcoholism, and abuse. I thought I had only two choices: either succeed or absolutely sink. No in-between.

None of that emotionally healthy thinking was instilled in me. I only understood secrets, suppression, succeeding at all costs, overachieving. You make it or you don’t. You either sink or you swim.

“A hard head makes a soft ass.” That means some lessons you have to learn the hard way.

I don’t know what my jam was, but it wasn’t drinking, and I certainly wasn’t dating or having sex.

To combat that, I always had a lot of jobs. I worked as an RA and counselor in the Preparatory Enrollment Program during the summer. I always worked. Senior year I had four jobs while in school full-time. I worked in the college library. I worked at the Rhode Island College front desk. I continued working at Brooks Drugs in Central Falls. And I had one other on-campus job.

Working hard is great when it’s motivated by passion and love and enthusiasm. But working hard when it’s motivated by deprivation is not pleasant.

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.

I was still painfully shy, uncomfortable, and awkwardly introverted outside of theater. I avoided conversations, avoided dating, still no boyfriend and no sex.

It took a lot for me to trust people. To really allow anyone in. My posse was always small because of that.

I remember thinking, Why am I staring at her so much? Something about her drew me toward her and tattooed itself in my memory.

It took me by surprise. It sounded just like . . . ME!

That incentivized me to earn the rest of the money I needed to go to New York and study at this great theater. That summer, a month before the program started, I worked in a horrible factory. To actors who say, “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.”

Alan’s flamboyance was in his intense quiet observation.

Emily and I were really close that summer. We were both painfully shy and awkward, and people like that usually find and cling to each other. We talked about life all the time and she just kept saying she wanted to get better. Better from what I didn’t know.

But even I wanted to know where she lost her voice, and why she always looked scared, jittery.

Showing intense emotion, she finally said softly, “My father would hold me down on the bed when I was nine and beat and rape me. He would cover my mouth.” T...

Alan asked if she wanted to do the scene again. She wanted to. She was braving something and it wasn’t acting. This class was a tool to unlock a deep pain, to save that little nine-year-old girl. Her scream was the sound of an animal that’s about to be slaughtered by a pack of wolves and is calling on every strength left in its body to fight, to live. It was also a sound of loss. “It’s GOD’S! THIS BABY BELONGS...

Me? I was jealous. All my scenes were emotional, well explored, I thought. But this was next level. I was broken and my brokenness brought me here, to acting, to New Yor...

I was living in an apartment in Gramercy Pack with two friends from Rhode Island College. I never had sex, never had a boyfriend, never lived on my own. Never traveled overseas. 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.

Whether you have an education or not, the ugliness of racism comes down like a hammer. It enveloped my life when I was eight and at twenty-three, I was still bullied by it.

It was a great production. Danielle thrived in it and got great reviews from the Boston Globe, the Providence Journal, and several other newspapers. She was also getting straight As in school.

“I just thought you should know, I’ve got forty-five minutes. I’m doing a play in Providence. My half-hour call is at 7:30. It’s a four-and-a-half-hour train ride. You have to tell me whether I’m in or out.” I can’t believe I said that.

They looked shocked, as if I pimp-slapped them. But they said, “Okay. Just stand by.”

“There are things you have to work on. But we see your gift as an actor, your emotional wealth.” “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,” I

As much as I would love to romanticize that part of my life, I can’t. I was so unfinished. I asked God for a boyfriend, professional acting status, and the experience of traveling overseas. But I didn’t ask for wisdom. I didn’t ask for self-love. And it showed.

I was with a man who never loved me. My objective the entire seven years was earning his love. I would internally pray, convincing myself that THIS would be the day he’d profess that he couldn’t live without me.

I was into the outward marks of achievement rather than the inner sense of home with a man, a sense of belonging to oneself.

I used to be secretly jealous of people who were even in bad relationships.

My thought was, He cried and said he wanted you and loved you? I never heard that in seven years. But it was not David. It was me.

I went to his house to tell him, “We’re done.” He wanted to have sex and I most definitely didn’t. I was on my period. We struggled. He kept pulling my pants down. I thought about punching him, but I didn’t. Maybe that would’ve been an acknowledgment that what was happening was rape. So I gave in and afterward left, ashamed.

I compartmentalized the trauma and filtered it so that it would lie to me and keep me safe. Another dirty secret, another shame lashing.

Why didn’t I punch his ass in the face?! Why didn’t I fight the same way six-year-old Viola did when the boy next door tried to kiss and touch me in his house? Si...

It pissed him off so that he studied every war America has ever fought and researched African American involvement in them. Every single war we fought in. Even during Jim Crow when we were not nearly given the same rights as our white counterparts. That was patriotism! If that didn’t speak volumes about our love and commitment to this country, nothing did. He also studied music, Black history.

“No, if you want it, it’s yours.” “How much is it?” “$290 a month.”

I asked, “How many Black people in this audience feel like you have a body tied to your back? How many are trying to live and strive in a culture that has weighed us down and is more interested in our demise than our life?”

Listening to classmates “ooh” and “aah” over the beautiful costumes and imagining how awesome life would be back in the 1780s.

I kept wanting to scream it. “Shit!!! I’m different than you!! If we went back to 1780, we couldn’t exist in the same world! I’m not white!”

The absolute shameful objective of this training was clear—make every aspect of your Blackness disappear. How the hell do I do that? And more importantly, WHY??!!! None of my counterparts had to perfect Jamai...