Thicker than Water: A Memoir

by Kerry Washington

Unlike many European immigrants, though, what they found in the United States was a complicated obstacle course of not only class, but caste.

As she got older, notwithstanding her brown skin, the traits stemming from my mother’s European roots—her thinner lips, more Anglican nose, less coarse hair—aligned her appearance with a beauty that was considered exotic. While in her Caribbean home her appearance was deemed “less than,” in the larger Black community she was thought of as a beautiful oddity. The wounds inflicted in her youth run deep, however, and she spent most of her life feeling more odd than beautiful. My mother, believing that it was not an option to traffic on her looks or rely on the unconditional love of her family, was determined to be smart, independent, self-reliant, and successful. That determination, as well as the struggle with self-esteem that inspired it, was passed on to me.

In that moment the distance between where my grandfather was from and the life my dad was living started to become clear. And in some ways, LT Nanny stood at the gates of that divide. No one was more excited to return to the comforts of Hilton Head. And while my dad was proud to be a landowner and to stand on property passed down to him from his father, he seemed even more proud to be identified as “rich.” From where I sat in that car, the appearance of wealth seemed to hold more value than the worth of the land itself. I learned that appearances matter, and that to be thought of as wealthy or powerful or successful was a goal worth pursuing, whether it was true or not.

It’s true I probably chose the job I did because of who my dad is. He taught me that anything was possible—in fact, I reached for the impossible because of how he sees the world. But how I do what I do—the work ethic and the technique and the professionalism and the drive—that’s from my mother. So, my mother’s drive to educate me, mixed with my dad’s endless imagination, encoded within me the artist that I would become. Today, well-researched magical realism is my job. And I feel blessed to love what I do. But even before it was my occupational calling, the ability to live in my imagination was necessary for survival, because in the reality of my day-to-day interactions with my parents, there was an inexplicable cognitive dissonance that made it impossible to fully connect. I did not lack for food, clothing, shelter, or culture—or any number of nice things—but I longed for an authentic connection with my parents. Something was missing, something felt wrong. And as many children do, I thought that something was me. What’s wrong with me? I asked myself, Why can’t I connect? Because despite all of it—the magic of Fantasia and the Broadway shows and the hawks and the sharks—from an early age I knew that something stood between my parents and me,

Leaning into my curiosity is perhaps the single most important tool my mother has given me. Swimming in the deep end is most definitely my superpower.

The thing about an illusion is that, unless you are the magician, you don’t always see the trick when you are inside of it.

had yet to unfold. We were a family that colored inside the lines. We were innovators and entrepreneurs, but we were not rule breakers. We were the family that voted for barbed wire around our precious pool and called security when those boys dove into the deep end in the middle of the night. We desperately wanted to control the chaos that threatened our sense of safety. We would do almost anything to protect the illusion of our perfection.

My prayer is that their spirits remain as powerful and buoyant on land as they are in the water. And in the light of day as well as at night.

FINE can be an acronym for fucked-up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional.

I was no stranger to my mother’s protective veils. She had one for me, too. But this was different. Unlike the veil that she deployed to keep me from being able to read her innermost thoughts, the veil induced by my dad was designed to keep my mother’s rage trapped deep inside her. The veil that greeted me was sheer and fluid—it obscured her from me, created a distance between us that was necessary for her to maintain her secrets, but it never entirely hid my mother from my view. The veil that existed between her and my dad, though? That was ironclad. Night after night, I watched my mother gird herself with emotional armor on the inside while remaining calm and stoic on the outside, almost as if a warmer, gentler portrait of herself was painted on the surface of her mask. This performance, this presentation of herself, was not that of a wife, disappointed and disgruntled. She often tried, at least at first, to project some other, more peaceful version of herself into the situation to diffuse the potential for confrontation between them. So, whatever my dad saw when he walked in the door, this was not my mother’s truth. It was a mask, a performance. The dialogue, and the blocking, were an exercise in avoidance. She seemed to decide that this man was not deserving of her truth, and that the easiest way to get through this moment, this evening, this marriage, and perhaps this lifetime was to keep him out and communicate from behind the mask.

As I got older and my mother realized I was growing less comfortable in my costume, the recipes for compliance and avoidance that she used to whisper to me turned into more stern instructions or mildly desperate directives.

Outside our home, my dad was a hero. Inside the walls of our tiny Bronx enclave, he was a tragedy seemingly unaware of the real drama unfolding around him.

I developed panic attacks at night. They manifested first as a rhythm of anxiety that encircled my brain, then evolved into a rapid pulsing, a whirling frenzy of metallic thumps, like those nauseating old spinning rides at a county fair. This was not just a feeling. It was a sound, an internal beat, or series of beats, though they didn’t equate to music. It was the sound of terror, wholly unnatural and unconnected to the rhythms of my heart. I was dizzied with fear, no ground beneath me; it was crazy-making, endless. And sad. There was something so sad about the rhythm. And I couldn’t make it stop. I couldn’t sleep. It was as though the alarms within me had been triggered and there was no turning them off.

Lying in bed, I would race to fall asleep before the sounds would leak from my bones. I would force myself to try to have “good” thoughts. I hated that the rhythm came from within me. I hated that my own brain was not to be trusted. If I lost the race to sleep and got caught by the rhythm, I had no tools to escape it, no way of controlling my own brain as it conspired against me. I tried everything to avoid it. If I could sense it coming on, from deep within my cells, I would try to sing a song, or recite a poem, or do anything I could think of to simply turn my brain off. But it would take hold in my fascia, then work outward through my muscles and tendons. Sometimes, I would rock my body back and forth, vibrating, rattling, trying to drown out the pulsing noise and regain control of my body. Sometimes I would put my head under a pillow, trying to ignore the fact that the torture was coming from within me. But only exhaustion would override the rhythm, lulling me to the dream state beyond my fears. I would fight the haunting rhythm as it rose in me, often having to compete with my parents’ fights in the next room. If my inner rhythm won, I was tortured by the tempo of my own obsessive brain; if my parents’ arguing won, I was trapped by fear. One night around that time, I hurled the pillow to the ground in frustration. I knew that my job was to hide, to stay in my room and pretend that this was not happening—I understood that they were only fighting because they believed t...

My mind and body became the enemy; I was trapped within them. I tucked away the fear and started to develop a role, a character that would stay with me: The good girl. The perfect child. The solution. It was clear that my parents had lost their ability to express their love for each other, but perhaps a shared love for me could help them find it again. Maybe my goodness could inspire a renewed tenderness between them, which would in turn create more emotional security for me, something that I so desperately needed. Perhaps there was no changing the reality that they had grown disappointed and disillusioned with each other, but I could make it better, or at least try.

“My therapist told me the cruelest thing you can ever do to another human being is to label their suspicions as false when you know them to be true.” His therapist explained that when you teach a person to believe that their internal truth is a lie, you take from them the very thing that is most important to each of us—our ability to know and trust ourselves.

One of the consequences of growing up in a household with half-truths is that there is no space for trust to thrive. My parents did not trust me with their painful truths and I, in turn, learned not to trust them with mine. Not out of resentment or anger, but simply because the withholding of truth and the avoidance of pain were the unspoken rules of engagement that lived deep within the foundation of our family unit.

I vowed to fill the emotional space between us so that I could feel safe, but I could not fill that space with truth. My parents’ inability to express their truths modeled for me that it was inappropriate for me to express mine. Their comfort seemed to rely on pleasantries, perfectionism, and emotional isolation. And so, to be closer to them, or to move them closer to me, I chose to try to be their beautiful, perfect, gifted, quiet, and easy child. Maybe then I would be worthy—perhaps then I could finally get the fullness of their hearts.

I wanted more truth, I wanted access to the secrets that were hidden within me—the anger, the pain, the fear, the joy, the relief. I wanted it to be OK for me to be messy, to be wrong, to be bad. I couldn’t feel my feelings at home; I couldn’t share them with anyone. So, I set out on a journey to find places where my feelings would be accepted and my secrets could be told, even in code. I was willing to be whoever I needed to be, but I knew I had to be someone other than myself.

And this is how acting began to save my life.

If my life as Kerry Washington was relegated to chasing safety and love through the performance of low-maintenance, good-girl perfectionism, then the characters I played became my necessary escape into messy creativity, big bold feelings, and living out loud. In every character, I got to be somebody else. And that person got to be a real human being—in fact, it was my job to try to make her so. Each role I took on gave me permission to escape the trappings of my family’s dance and explore what being human could feel like. Each character needed me to feel deeply, to take risks, and to tell their truth. Through acting I would meet mentors, professors, and teachers who encouraged my embodied truth—in fact, acting itself would become my mentor, whispering to me, quietly calling me to adventure. “Come play!” it would say. “Come act, come pretend.” Like a seductive siren call, the scenes, the projects, the roles would call to me, saying, “forget your truth, tell mine instead,” and as an actor I would get to explore alternate realities and step into illusions, all the while still looking for the truth in them, seeking their humanity, and searching for myself. Looking back, I realize that in acting I discovered a lifeline that not only saved me but sustained me for decades. I have lived through my characters, looking for ways to speak freely, feel deeply, and be seen fully. To be believed. I spent years wrestling with the truth and searching for myself in every role I played, grat...

In high school, when I was struggling emotionally, no one had to know—I could pour my heart into playing the depressed hopelessness of Ophelia and terrorizing madness of Lady Macbeth. Their big feelings could stand in for my own. Acting taught me the power of catharsis and helped me survive my own depression and madness by allowing me to express myself. Being somebody else was more comfortable for me than being me. Onstage, I knew who I was, I understood my story, and I always knew what to say and do next—it was prescribed. Offstage, as Kerry, I was much less sure of my truth, much more insecure, confused, and lonely. The gaslighting—from the frozen boy, from my parents—had robbed me of that clarity and power.

Even today, there is the inevitable code-switching and double consciousness required for survival as a Black person in America, but that shape-shifting can be empowering. As an adult, I’ve told myself that I was not abandoning myself to fit in—I was flexing my capacity to feel at home in diverse environments. But if I’m honest, it’s not until recently that I’ve begun to understand how to be an integrated person who moves fluidly through different spaces as herself.

This is when the connection between art and social change became crystal clear to me. I started to understand the power of representation, the need for people to see themselves in the content they consume, but also the power of content to change how they think and feel and behave. When our ability to connect authentically with our audiences was challenged—because a church didn’t want us to mention homosexuality, or a school board was resistant to us using the word “condom”—our devotion to the material, in service of our audience, propelled us into activism. It wasn’t just what we were saying in the show that made us educators and activists. It was also how we protected the art we were making, how we defended it, how we fought for the right to have it live in the world.

I did not reach for connections that were real and true; instead, I wanted to perform and escape into the hidden canyons of my imagination. And when life required me to exist in the realm of reality, I found ways to perform still, reaching for facades of lovable perfection and pursuing the freedom that I thought might be granted to me if only I could unlock the secrets of how to be, or maybe even just pretend to be, better.

a pendant in the shape of the Greek symbol for theater—with one mask representing comedy, and the other representing tragedy. I had seen it months before while shopping with my mother and had fallen in love with those two tiny masks. I wanted the pendant because I felt that it communicated to the world what I was most passionate about. I had a painted ceramic version of the masks that hung on my bedroom wall, too. The image of one face smiling and the other in tears held deeper meaning for me, not only as a symbol of my favorite hobby, but also as a representation of both the masks I was learning to wear in life to hide my true feelings and the emotional fluency I was allowed to experience onstage.

had chosen to go to GWU—a much larger school than many of the schools my Spence classmates had picked—because they offered the most financial aid, and because I was looking for a sense of belonging. To find that belonging, I needed room to explore and discover who I was. I needed to cast a wide net and make sure that the people I’d be meeting would expand my world, and that the opportunities to discover myself would be wide-ranging.

My mother eventually explained that she was attempting to free me from chores to make time for me to pursue my passions. But shielding me from learning the logistics of self-care meant that I had been groomed for success, but not self-sufficiency. For some reason she didn’t feel she could give me both.

Auditioning can be brutal. As an actor, there is no piano to sit at, no instrument to hide behind. You are the instrument of your expression, and your humanity is on the line. Decisions will be made about whether to reward you not based on whether you can kick your leg high enough or sing the notes low enough—what is evaluated instead is… you. Sometimes there is small talk, and in this brief window you try to simultaneously project warmth and likeability while also keeping your brain focused on the specificity and intensity required of the scene work that you will soon have to drop into. You stand in front of a group of decision makers—mostly strangers, at least at the beginning of your career—and you let them ogle you, evaluate you, and judge you before you utter a word. Because of this, you must painstakingly think through every choice—how to dress and wear your hair and what makeup to apply—because when you enter that casting office, your body is a walking billboard for whether or not you are “the one.” Auditioning is one of the areas in my life where I learned the hard way that I needed to take hold of the concept of success and wrangle it away from the grip of others to define it for myself. This may sound strange coming from a person who is considered generally successful, but I don’t do well when my goal is to be liked, loved, popular, or famous. I can’t control what other people think of me, and when I try, even now, I can lose a sense of myself and get pulled back...

In scene study class we studied our characters’ objectives, obstacles, and given circumstances. In movement class, we learned about our centers of gravity, unconscious movement patterns, and breath work. But in “Acting as a Business,” we learned to view ourselves as active participants in the goals we wanted to achieve. The class was taught by veteran actor Caryn West and was meant to offer each of us a straight-talk approach to thinking about ourselves not just as artists, but as the entrepreneurs, salespeople, and marketing executives—basically, the CEOs—of our own creative lives. We learned that too often actors are taught to focus on the art of their performance without being taught how to think proactively and strategically as professionals in the workplace. We talked about how to pursue work, how to obtain representation, the best ways to supplement our income on the way to our dreams, and the day-to-day resources available to us as we worked to craft a life in the arts. It was in that class that I first began to understand that as an actor you are both the producer and the product, the marketer and marketed, the driver of innovation and the passenger on the unpredictable ride that is show business. And it was also in that class that I first became aware of actors’ unions. I had joined the Screen Actors Guild years before as a result of getting a speaking role in an ABC after-school special entitled My Special Angel (in which I played an unnamed high school cheerlead...

It’s the work that excites me more than anything. I appreciate the results, I enjoy the premieres, I’m grateful for the magazine covers… but it’s the hard dig that I love, the rehearsals and the discovery process and the scene setting and the fight prep and finding the perfect shoe. What’s happening in this scene? What do these characters want? What are the emotional stakes? What’s the historical context? What is the story being told and why does it matter? The dramaturgy: that’s what I love, and that’s what I learned at GWU.

was determined to pursue a professional life in the arts, but I wanted to use the last two years of college to understand everything about the history of performance and how it operates in the world, as well as the role that performance plays in our everyday lives—how we perform our thoughts, feelings, and identities. I designed an interdisciplinary major for myself titled “Performance Studies,” in which I explored performance in various societies and cultures through both a social science and a fine arts lens. For my thesis show, I defined myself in various ways—as a woman, Black person, daughter, activist—and developed a one-woman piece with a vignette for each aspect of my identity using music, dance, monologue work, and anthropological role play. I performed the show in a black-box theater with the support of fellow students serving in various crew positions in stage management and choreography. I was trying to figure myself out. Performance had become not only my greatest passion but also my way of navigating through life, being who I thought I had to be or who others wanted me to be. It had become so integral to my existence that studying it was my attempt at taking the mask off performance itself, hoping to find myself.

To perform meant to deliver excellence and to meet, if not exceed, expectations. More than anything, acting for me was the magical practice of using detailed characters and specific stories to be a mirror, to reflect some truths about humanity back to an audience that does not see us, the actors, but rather sees a version of themselves. To perform also meant to devote myself to a creative process of expression that allowed me to transform and often disappear. So those two versions of me became even more pronounced: “Kerry,” who was rooted, always, in the search for perfectionism and approval; and the more real me, who felt most comfortable when afforded the invisibility that resulted from pouring myself into an imaginary character. I embraced both performances in order to survive. To exist was to perform. And so, I was never not onstage.

Food from my mother was my comfort—it was how she loved me from afar. And when I ate, I felt less lonely, even if only for a moment. But food as emotional comfort can be problematic. When food is detached from physical nourishment and used predominantly as a tool to either feel better or feel nothing, there comes a time when there is not enough food in the world to fill the void.

food and exercise were at first ideal ways to indulge compulsive behaviors because I could hide them more easily than drugs or alcohol. And that constant manipulation of my own behavior allowed me the illusion of control. This excessive swinging between extremes was accompanied by a consistent hatred of my body. If my childhood had been spent in the constant pursuit of being better, the seeds of perfectionism had blossomed into self-contempt.

But I had lost control, and I knew it. My entire life revolved around the vicious cycle of hating what I saw in the mirror, using food to comfort and quiet those thoughts and feelings, and then punishing myself with exercise and starvation to try to fix this body that seemed to be the source of all my pain. I was at war with myself. There seemed to be no escape from the demons; that hopelessness and agony led to thoughts of suicide. And I started to realize that I couldn’t fix this on my own.

Kalarypayattu, a martial art that is thought to sit at the root of all the other performance traditions of South India, and yoga.

It was a new feeling, a feeling of being fully present and alive. I felt like I was inside my skin, as though my cells themselves were breathing. It was as if my fullest sense of self was embodied within the walls of my physical being. And until that moment, I did not know that this was a way to be in the world. Up until then, the closest feeling I’d had was the feeling of aliveness I experienced when I was in water, or when I was onstage pretending to be somebody else. But this was a sense of full presence, on land, as me.

Ms. Checken described the final position of the class as “corpse pose”—Shavasana. This asana, she explained, is usually the final position in any yoga practice. Its purpose is to fully rest the body in a deep state of relaxation and meditation before moving on with the day. As we lay on our backs as directed—with our palms facing up and our feet hip-width apart—Ms. Checken walked us through a guided meditation. She asked us to tense and tighten individual body parts for a count of three and then release and relax each one—first our hands, then our forearms, then our ears, noses, all the way down to our toes. She told us to imagine with each breath that every single part of our body was sinking deeper into the floor beneath us. And then she stopped talking. And we just lay there, breathing.

Yoga would become a bridge back to wholeness, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I started to find space within my body, to rest and reside within it. And I started to understand that there was strength to be found in stillness and determination required on the journey toward flexibility. One translation of the Sanskrit word “yoga” is “to yoke”—yoking myself to yoga became a new way to think about everything, including my relationship with myself. Even in college and after, in the midst of a binge, I would turn to yoga to confront my demons, accept the insanity, love myself, stop the behavior, and reset. Yoga, I learned, was not just a form of exercise, but a way of life.

I was learning to seek peace in the comfort of a higher power, rather than in the endorphin spike of compulsive bingeing, or the numbing results of abusive starvation, or even the false belief that all would be well if I could attain whatever body I had come to believe was perfect. I was beginning to embrace the idea that surrendering to a power greater than myself, a power I was starting to refer to as “God,” was a more reliable pathway to peace than the pursuit of perfection. Everywhere I turned in India, God—and the many forms in which God manifests in the Hindu tradition—was present. From the phrase most used to greet others—“namaste,” which translates to “the God in me salutes the God in you”—to the altars in every home, business, and even on the sides of the road, God was in all things. God was in people, and places, and situations that took me out of my comfort zone—the language, the food, the culture, and most especially for me, in the deep traditions of centuries-old movement and performing arts.

Every time I was not chosen to play a role, I slid back into those early feelings of invisibility, loneliness, and inadequacy.

Being an actor is a great blessing because you get to step into a character, usually at the most pivotal points in their life—you learn their biggest lessons, integrate them into your own understanding, and, if you’re lucky, move on to another character in another transformative moment. This means you, as the actor, get to evolve through the characters if you let them teach you. It was as if these women, these powerful characters, were each trying to teach me something. They were like waking dreams coming through my subconscious. And because I struggled with fully understanding myself, my learning came through these characters, tiny miracles in the pursuit of my own awakening. Eventually I would begin to ask those same questions of myself. I would learn to give myself the love and dignity that I bestowed upon my characters, to give myself permission to exist, to live, to be real, to take up space, and to matter.

Why hadn’t I protected myself? Why hadn’t I had the courage to create boundaries around my womb? Why had I silenced my preferences in the name of people-pleasing? This all could have been avoided. If I had spoken up for myself in the moment, I wouldn’t have found myself in that office. But there I was, surrendering my insides to a surgical vacuum, trying to repair the damage born of my silence and need to be loved.

Trust requires consistency, and outside of work, I was at best inconsistent.

When my kids go to bed at night, before I leave the room, I almost always say, “Thank you for choosing me.” This phrase came to me when I was reading a book called The Conscious Parent by Shefali Tsabary. In her book, Tsabary argues that we have traditionally gotten a key element of parenting backward. We have been taught to think that kids come into the world and it is our job to mold them, guide them, and help turn them into the people they’re meant to be. Tsabary believes that our job is not to make our children better; rather, our children are opportunities for us to become better, to serve them, and to make room for who they are meant to be. The idea resonated with me because it reminded me of one of my favorite Buddhist teachings. I was once at a meditation retreat with Pema Chödrön, an ordained Buddhist nun, where she told the parable of two friends sitting together before their souls incarnated and arrived on Earth. In the story, one soul turns to the other and says, “I want you to grow. I love you so much that I will choose to be your biggest teacher in this lifetime. In our lives together, I will cause you great pain and suffering and our relationship will teach you to move closer to the Divine.” As our children challenge us, if we remain committed to serving their highest good, I believe they move us closer to our best selves. Even before I was pregnant with Isabelle, I knew it was true of my relationship with Anaiya—knowing her and loving her has always made me...

But also, when one is “at sea,” it means they are lost, without a land to belong to, or a ship to travel in; it means one is a refugee.