Finding Me

by Viola Davis

You know, when you’re poor, you live in an alternate reality. It’s not that we have problems different from everyone else, but we don’t have the resources to mask them.

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.

There was just a basic understanding that they (everyone else) were better. They were victims of unfortunate circumstances and needed love and healing. I, however, was just born bad.

My sisters became my platoon. We were all in a war, fighting for significance. Each of us was a soldier fighting for our value, our worth.

Success pales in comparison to healing.

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.

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 York, to wanting to heal and live and feel alive!

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.

If you hit big when you’re young and turn down a six-figure salary, You. Are. Privileged. That’s not throwing shade. Hell, anyone would love it if that were their path. But struggle is defined by not having choices, and the actor who takes the Geico commercial to get their insurance has just as much integrity as someone who doesn’t take it waiting for their Academy Award–winning role.

Yet the people who are aspiring to be actors and have no knowledge as to a way in listen to the testimonies of the privileged. The ones who were extremely talented, but also extraordinarily lucky. Luck is an elusive monster who chooses when to come out of its cave to strike and who will be its recipient. It’s a business of deprivation.

It’s hard to see when your journey to the top had more ease, but in reality, there is no ease.

If you want to be an actor, you will find a way. Beware of the actor who says they’ve always turned down work but never made the choice to go do theater for $250 a week to feel fulfilled. Fame is intoxicating.

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. The purpose of life is to live it.

Live life and enjoy the journey.

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.

Why can’t I be sexualized? Why can’t I be vulnerable? Why can’t I have a husband and a boyfriend? Why can’t I be a leading lady?

In people there is an infinite box of different types, different situations, different behaviors. Those types contradict perceptions. They tear down preconceived notions. They are as complicated and vast as the galaxy itself. In life, I exist.