Viola Davis is a versatile American screen actress, stage performer and producer. She is known for her diverse and electrifying performances in Out Of Sight, Solaris, Antwone Fisher, Doubt, Help, and the series How to Get Away with Murder.

She is not only the recipient of many awards but has also been recognized in Time’s list of 100 Most Influential People in the world.

What’s amazing is that Viola didn’t grew up in comfort. She encountered abuse, addiction, poverty, deprivation while growing up in Rhode Island. So, there is so much we can learn from Viola Davis’ life, about humble beginnings, racism, colorism, struggling and surviving hardships,

Also see: If you have Netflix, go and check out ‘Oprah + Viola: A Netflix Special Event’

Her biography ‘Finding Me’ and Oprah’s special interview with her are raw, riveting and highly inspiring. Here are a few personal lessons I drew from her interview about her book:

Learn to Stand Up for Yourself

Viola Divas had a tough time at school. She was called an “ugly nigga”. Boys would chase after her and throw whatever they could find at her, stones, bricks, shoes. So, she constantly had to look behind her back, be vigilant. She fought back. She would carry a crocheting needle to school and threaten those boys; she would swear and curse back at them. It was this memory of being a damaged and called an ugly girl that she carried to her adulthood. She thought she was cursed!

But alongside, she had the drive to do better, work harder. So, what Voila end up doing was that she put on her mask of mannerism, bravery, confidence, slickness, becoming “that boss woman that no one should see sweating”.

End Generational Trauma

A lot of us expect a lot more from their parents and children than they can offer or give. This causes so much pain and resentment. Viola had to step between her parents, stand up to her abusive father to tell him NOT to hit her mom. In many ways, she had to do something that was beyond her years. She defines the conflict in this way:

For Viola, this was the turning point in her life. She felt that she didn’t have the emotional maturity to be doing what was supposedly not her job to do.

 But she realized that she had the strength and maturity in her all along. And those painful tests of her life just brought these traits forward.

According to Viola, the success of the therapy she underwent was that she eventually realized that our parents can be vulnerable too. So, they are anything but perfect.

Eventually, a day comes when the children realize that their parents have done the best they could with the little they had. This is when life comes full circle for them.

Own Your Past – In and Out

Viola recalls a time from her school, when she would go to school reeking because she had a bad bed-wetting problem as a 14-year-old. There used to be no running water or soap in the house or ventilation to dry out her washed clothes properly.

As a result, the school nurse would counsel her and her sister about hygiene. But alongside the shame, Viola remembers the nurse’s and her teacher’s kindness and empathy.

Now, it’s the kind of memory and legacy no one is proud of, no one loves or considers worth remembering. But the candid honesty with which Viola has penned down everything, owned everything is refreshing. After all, showbiz is all about keeping appearances. Yet there are those who remind us of our own pain, imperfections and rawness. This is what lessens the bridge between art and life!

Struggle is Part of Any Journey

What strikes me about Voila is that she has not denied her past. She recalls these chapters of her life with as much pride and ownership as the rest of her illustrious life.

 She feels that the struggle is part of the journey, the finding of oneself.. “going in these caves of trauma and vitriol.” According to her:

She had the idea that she had to work with whatever God had given her and use her bravery to go forward and create the life that she had always wanted.

Self-Transformation Requires Making Hard Choices

Viola believes that the journey of self-transformation is hard, long and tough! It requires you to be honest with yourself. Going through it means trying to find and become your ideal self. But when you do that you also come across, discover facets of your personality, parts of self that you don’t want to be anymore, that you don’t want to become eventually. You see your own flaws, come across painful things from your past, that still cause you pain. Viola says that at that fork road, you have two choices: You can allow that pain to overpower and engulf you or you can move on. Viola’s choice was to move on and she decided to go to therapy when she was in her late 20s because she wanted to be different, she wanted to be better. This is what she did exactly!

The Sum Up What We Can Learn from Viola Davis

Strong women with a growth-oriented mindset like Viola Davis can teach us many things: the need to own your past, the necessity to stand up for yourself, to end generational trauma through forgiveness, to accept struggle as part of growth, to accept that self-transformation requires making tougher choices and sticking with them. Therefore, Viola’s narrative to find herself can help many of us find the courage and inspiration we need in life to go forward.