Top highlights from Finding Me
My biggest discovery was that you can literally re-create your life. You can redefine it. You dont have to live in the past. I found that not only did I have fight in me, I had love.
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Memories are immortal. Theyre 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 thats based more in other peoples tucked-up perceptions than truth.
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May you live long enough to know why you were born. CHEROKEE BIRTH BLESSING
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I knew my life would be a fight, and I realized this: I had it in me.
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I now understand that life, and living it, is more about being present. Im now aware that the not-so-happy memories lie in wait; but the hope and the joy also lie in wait.
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Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a different past. They tell you successful therapy is when you have the big discovery that your parents did the best they could with what they were given.
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As soon as he came into my life, my life got better because I created a family with him, with someone who loved me. I was no longer solely defined by the family that raised me and my childhood memories.
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It is a widely held belief that dark-skinned women just don't do it for a lot of Black men. 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. It's ingrained thinking, dictated by oppression.
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Taking off the wig in HTGAWM was my duty to honor Black women by not showing an image that is palatable to the oppressor, to people who have tarnished, punished the image of Black womanhood for so long. It said all of who we are is beautiful. Even our imperfections.
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Thats what he asked me next. It was a big moment for me. I said, No, but Im doing the work. Im in therapy. Ive gotta clean things up before I can invite anyone into my life to love me.
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May you live long enough to know why you were born.
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learned the hard way that when there are underlying issues, money does nothing. In fact, money exacerbates the problem because it takes away the individuals ability to be held accountable.
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Remember the love.... Dont play the pain and betrayal, play the woman fighting hard to restore the love.
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I was sold lies for two years and the worst part is that I believed it because I couldn't combat it with anything else.
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I could create my own family and I could create it intentionally with what I had learned.
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had no understanding that there would be hard times and then joy would come, or sometimes the shoe would fall, but failing wasnt permanent. None of that emotionally healthy thinking was instilled in me. I only understood secrets, suppression, succeeding at all costs, overachieving. You make it or you dont. You either sink or you swim.
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There was an expectation of perfectionism without the knowledge of emotional well-being.
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Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a different past.
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When my dad passed, part of my heart went with him thats never coming back. I feel the same way about Julius. I feel the same way about my child, my mom, sisters. Its one heart. They are completely entwined in my spirit.
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Being with that group of women who so easily gave up their vanity and just went for it was a huge learning curve for me.
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I am a dark-skinned woman. Culturally, there is a spoken and unspoken narrative rooted in Jim Crow. It tells us that dark-skinned women are simply not desirable. All the attributes that are attached to being a woman-desireable, vulnerable, needing to be rescued-don't apply to us. In the past we've been used as chattel, fodder for inhumane experimentation, and it has evolved into invisibility.
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We are after all observers of life. We are after all a conduit, a channeler of people. What you havent resolved in your life can absolutely become an obstacle in the work that you do.
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I answered the call to adventure...
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The TV and film business is saturated with people who think they're writing something human when it's really a gimmick.
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For every one actor who makes it to fame there are fifty thousand more who did exactly the same things, yet didnt make it.
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When youre poor, you live in an alternate reality. Its not that we have problems different from everyone else, but we dont have the resources to mask them. Weve been stripped clean of social protocol.
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Its futile to ask why. Instead ask yourself, What did I learn from this? What have I learned from all of it? There is absolutely no way whatsoever to get through this life without scars.
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The constantly being beaten down so much makes you begin to feel that youre wrong. Not that you did wrong, but you were wrong. It makes you so angry at your abuser, the one that youre too afraid to confront, so you confront the easiest target. Those you can. Until your heart gets tired. No one ever, up until that point, talked to us, asked us what our dreams were, asked us how we were feeling. It was on us to figure it out. 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 doesnt leave room for anything else. You just believe youre the leftovers.
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For a whole generation of Black people we were the dream. 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.
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first ingredient I needed to be an artist, the power to create. The power of alchemy, that magical process of transformation and creation to believe at any given time I could be the somebody I always wanted to be.
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What does that mean? I asked again. Look, Im always going to be that fifteen-year-old boy whose girlfriend broke up with him. Thats always going to be me. So, who are you? Who am I? I was quiet, and once again that indestructible memory hit me. Then I just blurted it out. Im the little girl who would run after school every day in third grade because these boys hated me because I was... not pretty. Because I was... Black. Will stared at me as if seeing me for the first time and just nodded. My throat got tight and I could feel the tears welling up. Memories are immortal. Theyre 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 thats based more in other peoples tucked-up perceptions than truth.
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Pare de fazer amor com o que est te matando.
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Todo mundo tem segredos. Todo mundo. Acho que a diferena que ou morremos com eles e deixamos que nos devorem, ou os colocamos para fora, lutamos com eles (ou eles lutam conosco) at que nos reconciliamos. Segredos so o que nos engole.
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The obstacle blocking me was a four-hundred-year-old racist system of oppression and my own feeling of utter aloneness.
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Annalise Keating released in me the obstacles blocking me from realizing my worth and power as a woman. Before that, I created a story. Sometimes stories are straight-up lies that you make up because you want what you remember to be different. Sometimes a story is simply how YOU saw that event, how you internalized it. And sometimes the truth simply is. Simply straight-up fact. I was erasing that made-up story. I decided it was time to tell my story, as I remember it, my truth.
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of Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The call
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It is a powerful memory because it was the first time my spirit and heart were broken.
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voc pode, sem a menor dvida, reescrever sua vida. Pode redefini-la. No preciso viver no passado.
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Memrias so imortais. So imperecveis e precisas. Tm o poder de dar alegria e perspectiva em tempos difceis. Ou podem sufocar. Definir voc de uma maneira que tem mais a ver com a percepo limitada das pessoas do que com a verdade.
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Luck is an elusive monster who chooses when to come out of its cave to strike and who will be its recipient. Its a business of deprivation.
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Everything had been hard for me. I mastered hard. Now, I wanted joy.
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you. That I deserve way of thinking is hard to reconcile in this business. A better question is this: Do you want to be an actor or do you want to be a famous actor? If you want to be famous, as the great Alan Arkin said, you will have a hard time. If you want to be an actor, you will find a way.
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There is no way out. Every painful memory, every mentor, every foe served as a chisel. A led path that has shaped me. Me. The imperfect but blessed sculpture Viola that still being chiseled.My elixir: I am no longer ashamed of myself. I own everything that happened to me.
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And whereas I cant live inside yesterdays pain, I cant live without it.
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Memories are immortal. Theyre deathless and precise.
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They have the power of giving you joy and perspective in hard times. Or, they can strangle you. Define you in a way thats based more in other peoples tucked-up perceptions than truth.
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Im no longer ashamed of me. I own everything that has ever happened to me. The parts that were a source of shame are actually my warrior fuel. I see peoplethe way they walk, talk, laugh, and grieve, and their silencein a way that is hyperfocused because of my past. Im an artist because theres no separation from me and every human being that has passed through the world including my mom.
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I was a powder cake of secrets. I kept them in because it allowed me to get through my day. I couldn't let what I was feeling out.Any chance I had to be part of something where I could make a mark, I joined in.
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Show me the hero. Show me the tragedy. Heroes always cause their own downfalls. I didn't want to be a hero.
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Courage is the cure.
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I was a powder cake of secrets. I kept them in because it allowed me to get through my day. I couldn't let what I was feeling out.
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