Finding Me

by Viola Davis

Success pales in comparison to healing.

But she said this was a teacher who simply never liked her because she always got straight As. She was the same teacher who told me in second grade that Black people could not read or write at all when they were slaves.

That was the day I decided to be a teacher. It devastated me so much that I didn’t want another kid to go through what I went through.”

The invisibility of the one-two punch that is Blackness and poverty is brutal. Mix that with being hungry all the damn time and it becomes combustible.

you’re hungry, you can’t focus—you have no energy. School lunch was our stable, assured meal. The food stamps our family received the first of each month paid for a grocery run. But the food soon ran out. When it was gone, my sisters and I mooched off the families of friends and dumpster-dived, rummaging through garbage for food.

My sister got $9 a month for the next few months from the man who molested her.

I became an actor because it’s a healing wellspring.

Suddenly, my stories of hardships seemed small, an awareness I felt God was orchestrating. I wanted my story to be small. I wanted it to shrink like a tumor down to a manageable size.

As an actor, you become a soul searcher. A thief. After the curtain call, you are left with you.

My lesson from Upward Bound was you have to open your mouth and own your friggin’ story. That terrified me more than rats.

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

It was trying to save someone else when I was drowning.

Successful Black women almost normalize overachieving.

only understood secrets, suppression, succeeding at all costs, overachieving. You make it or you don’t. You either sink or you swim.

That was when much of the depression fell away. The cure was courage.

The courage to dare, risking failure. I decided I was going to be a theater major and I was going to be an actor.

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.

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.

was about to go into the belly of the beast. Juilliard was about to rip apart my world. I would come face-to-face not with God, but with me.