Finding Me Quotes
"To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky. You must know why you are alive, or else everything is nonsense, just blowing in the wind." – ANTON CHEKHOV
"The attitude, anger, and competitiveness were my only weapons. My arsenal. And when I tell you I needed every tool of that arsenal every day, I’m not exaggerating."
"I was being hunted. By the time I got home, I was a snot-dripping, crying mess... every day."
"You’re Black, too." I yelled it this time, calling him by name. The gang remained silent. So quiet."
"That little girl SURVIVED!!!!!!" he stated emphatically."
"Can you let her be excited about the fifty-three-year-old she is going to become? Can you allow her to squeal with delight at that?"
"MaMama, I’m so sorry for how I acted back in the day, but I missed my mom. They had taken me from her."
"We’re going to have to go and try to get some heat assistance."
"And when I tell you I needed every tool of that arsenal every day, I’m not exaggerating."
"I wanted to squeeze out any level of joy and laughs I could. But the worst part is, deep inside there was a demon..."
"These happy moments would soon be followed by trauma."
"It was my way of disappearing. It was my high."
"The power to leave my body, to be relieved of Viola for a while, was an ever-present image that followed me for decades."
"Even now, me and Deloris have dreams about '128.'"
"She would slap and yell at us 'Keep ya ass still or I’ll burn ya.'"
"My parents gave us candy, some money, and we would stand in the yard waiting for anyone to pass by so they could see how cute we looked."
"Some battles we won—survived together and emerged with laughter and perspective."
"Sexual abuse back in the day didn’t have a name."
"Trauma, shit, piss, and mortar mixed with memories that have been filtered, edited for survival, and entangled with generational secrets."
"The only weapon I have to blast through it all is forgiveness."
"We were trying to make sugar candy on the stove."
"My parents started fighting while my mom was doing Dianne’s hair."
"It’s amazing how much a human body can endure."
"After every one of them there was a looming reality. How will we overcome this one?"
"I would arrive to school at 8 a.m. and by 8:30 I was falling asleep."
"We chose between laundry detergent, soap, or dishwashing liquid."
"She was beyond excited and took her paper back to her desk."
"The invisibility of the one-two punch that is Blackness and poverty is brutal."
"If you’re hungry, you can’t focus—you have no energy."
"I stayed after class to ask my teacher one question."
"It devastated me so much that I didn’t want another kid to go through what I went through."
"I wanted to talk like an actor and train like an actor."
"The process and artistry of piecing together a human being completely different from you was the equivalent of being otherworldly."
"I made it or I didn’t. You either sink or you swim."
"People like that usually find and cling to each other."
"This class was a tool to unlock a deep pain."
"I was jealous. All my scenes were emotional, well explored, I thought. But this was next level."
"I wanted to be able to say that I trained as an actor, now I’m working as an actor."
"There is no true network, no rhyme or reason or textbook way of getting into this business."
"I prayed harder when my father was beating MaMama."
"I prayed that my life would manifest in a way that made me worthy to become a professional actress."
"I was finally a working actor, not making bank, but enough to get by."
"I wish I had had the power, resources at that time to tell that racist woman to shove her apartment up her ass."
"In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone there’s a role for an eleven-year-old girl."
"It’s futile to ask why. Instead ask yourself, ‘What did I learn from this?’"
"How to love? How to be consistent and responsible, in control, create boundaries?"
"I felt almost desperate to explain this to God in exchange for forgiveness . . . to be cleansed."
"The apartment was never cold. It kept heat. I always had hot water."
"My graduation meal when I finished Juilliard was joyous and hysterical."
"I auditioned for a few roles that were described as light-skinned."
"I went home and bled profusely for two weeks and fell into a life-altering depression."
"Sometimes actors meet an agent and the vibe is What can you do for me?"
"When you work in theater, film, or TV, they fly you out and put you up."
"I was finally two weeks from graduating from Juilliard."
"The lawyer knows how much money is on the table. Legally makes sure everything has the right jargon in your contract."
"You don’t necessarily get paid for talent. You get paid for 'getting butts in the seat.'"
"Theater is a different beast. I never thought of myself as struggling."
"In the middle of the conversation, I just threw out a random statement, 'I wonder why I keep meeting assholes?'"
"The kind of truth that’s like a hundred-pound hammer that knocks the wind out of you."
"Unloading my shit felt like major surgery that had a high propensity for death."
"I never got girlfriend roles, even if you saw the girlfriend without the boyfriend."
"It was the combination of your stillness and that big hair."
"You can either leave something for people or you can leave something in people."
"I didn’t want to continue to be in and out of hospitals, bleeding during my periods for extended periods of time, sometimes for a month straight."
"I felt I had to make a Sophie’s choice, a transformative decision. I was done with the suffering."
"When I wake up, I don’t want my uterus to be there. I want a hysterectomy."
"I’m going to tell you something right now: I’m not going through this anymore. I’m not doing this anymore."
"I felt a great deal of fear. It was a leading lady role on network television."
"I never saw anyone on network TV who looked like me playing a role like this."
"I’m an artist because there’s no separation from me and every human being that has passed through the world including my mom."
"There are no words to describe the paperwork, hundreds of pages in which you revisit how you were raised, what your home environment was like as a child."
"My job is not to study other actors, because that is not studying life. As much as I can, I study people."