Finding Me

by Viola Davis

Cocksucker motherfucker” was my favorite expression

I don’t mention names because, well . . . their race is way more important in telling this story.

My heart was beating so fast. I kept silently praying for someone to come and save me.

I walked home, completely humiliated.

don’ you run from those bastards anymore. You hear me? Soon as that bell rings you WALK home! They mess with you, you jug ’em.”

She meant it. This was a woman with six kids. She didn’t have time to go to school every day and fight our battles.

The next day, it took every bone, muscle, and cell in my body to walk after that bell rang. I could hear the voices of the boys behind me. I could feel their rage. The hate. But I walked extra slow. So slow I barely moved.

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.

I had never stopped running. My feet just stopped moving.

God. I wanted so badly to fit into this world, but instead I was being spit out like vomit. Who I was offended them. The memory burrowed itself inside me and metastasized. It

I wanted to go back and scream to the eight-year-old me, “Stop running!” I wanted to heal her damage, her isolation.

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

“Can you hug her? Can you let her hug YOU?”

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

You are my home. Let me in.

She stands up, in tears, on a mound of snow. Pissed off, she shouts, “Bitch!!! I’m not going to be swallowed!”

All I know is, I felt a different level of being heartbroken for my mom when I learned the real driving force behind her decision not to return to school.

Scars. I think about the complexity of her childlike heart compared to the ferocious, maternal warrior who would angrily snatch her wig off to kick anybody’s ass who even thought about harming her babies.

He loved me. That I know. But his love and his demons were fighting for space within, and sometimes the demons won.

The most frightening figure in my life and the first man we all ever loved. Frightening? Without knowing, I had already been imprinted, stamped by their behavior and all that they were.

Achieving, becoming “somebody,” became my idea of being alive. I

I knew it was shit. But it was my shit. It was my home.

They were victims of unfortunate circumstances and needed love and healing. I, however, was just born bad.

“You went in to save me, Fred?” To which he replied, “No, I went in to save the fish because you so damn ugly.”

The applause. The acceptance is my takeaway. But my lack of self-love and my complete inability to open up to anyone about my one driving fear—“My father is going to beat my mom to death one day”—couldn’t be voiced.

We just wanted to win. We wanted to be somebody. We wanted to be SOMEBODY.

It was a magical, secret power, only I didn’t see myself as magical or powerful. I just felt free. It

The majority of my most joyful memories were from my relationship with my sisters.

was the one being humiliated, not the man who felt me up in front of everyone. I was just eight but felt dirty, spoiled.

Somewhere buried underneath all that waste lives me, the me fighting to breathe, the me wanting so badly to feel alive.

Success pales in comparison to healing.

Your first instinct when you love a child is to protect her from the pain of the world . . . and life.