Finding Me

by Viola Davis

Memories are immortal. They’re deathless and precise. They have the power of giving you joy and perspective in hard times. Or, they can strangle you. Define you in a way that’s based more in other people’s tucked-up perceptions than truth.

And though I was many years and many miles away from Central Falls, Rhode Island, I had never stopped running. My feet just stopped moving.

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

“Why are you trying to heal her? I think she was pretty tough. She survived.”

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 transformed and shares her story of survival with others.

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

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.”

As stubborn as a bull, as innocent as a child, and loyal even when she has been abandoned.

When I was young, I thought, perhaps arrogantly, that I could do better than my mom.

There are decades of suppressed secrets, trauma, lost dreams and hopes. It was easier to live under that veil and put on a mask than to slay them.

Abuse elicits so many memories of trauma that embed themselves into behavior

He was inaccessible to us for most of my childhood. I did not know how to reach him.

“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.

The constantly being beaten down so much makes you begin to feel that you’re wrong. Not that you did wrong, but you were wrong.

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

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.

When I was onstage, I could ingest the applause, audience member tears and words saying they were so moved and they never saw a performance like that before. It gave me temporary self-love from the outside. But it would soon wear off because self-love from the outside, by definition, really isn’t self-love.

I’m ashamed also because the last time I was with him, 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. That’s how I felt, but what I showed was a young woman in control. I compartmentalized the trauma and filtered it so that it would lie to me and keep me safe. Another dirty secret, another shame lashing.

Well, our soul was our instrument too.

“I did not come here for food. My stomach is full. I did not come here for food. I came for much more!”

The intent is to make as much noise as possible so God can hear you in heaven and pour down a blessing. The noise stopped and I looked around at the faces of the women smiling, laughing, screaming in manic desperation. They were trying to wake God up.

“Stop making love to something that’s killing you.”

Everybody has secrets. Everybody. I guess the difference is that we either die with them and let them eat us up, or we put them out there, wrestle with them (or they wrestle with us) until we . . . reconcile. Secrets are what swallow us.

was driven by the need to save everyone. I felt if I saved anyone, I had found my purpose, and that was the way it was supposed to work. You make it out and go back to pull everyone else out.

The kind of truth that’s like a hundred-pound hammer that knocks the wind out of you.

I was alone but not lonely, or so I thought. I was good if I didn’t think too deep.

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.

was officially different. I had changed. Everyone who knew me and spent time with me would stare and exclaim, “Man, Vee! You look great and seem so happy. You have changed!” “Wow, Vee . . . Julius has changed your life.” Yeah, he did, but I changed my life and Julius was the reward, my peace was the reward.

God was using me to be a leader in the area where I very much felt a victim.

The eight-year-old girl who had never been told “You’re worthy; you’re beautiful” suddenly found herself as a leading lady, and a mouthpiece for all the women who looked like her. I had no weapons to slay those naysayers, to change culture itself. The obstacle blocking me was a four-hundred-year-old racist system of oppression and my own feeling of utter aloneness. My art, in this instance, was the best healing tool to resolve my past, the best weapon that I had to conquer my present, and my gift to the future.

Our level of dreaming, of self-love and acceptance, is equal to the love, support, and permission of the images around us.

Once again, the woman I tried so hard not to be was the muse sitting on my shoulder.

My friend Edwina asked me how I got to where I am today. How did I claw my way out of poverty? That question always baffles me. Mostly because I simply don’t know. Oftentimes, honestly, I just feel I got lucky.

After that bathroom incident there was no more escaping. No escape routes. My spirit was plucked but my body was kept right in the same place because it was the only way that, when I gained vision and strength and forgiveness, I could remember what being in trauma means.

could see it and be amazed by my power to survive it. I lived it! I was there!