A Key Note Address at the Massachusetts Conference for Women
Lupita Nyong'o
December 4th, 2014
I
was asked to give this key note address some time in the spring. I was
very busy at the time and I was still coming down from the whole Awards
Season whirlwind. I have to admit that I only really agreed to do it
because it was far away in the future. But like all things far away in
the future, with time, they get nearer and nearer. And as it got nearer
and nearer I grew more and more fearful that I wouldn't know what to
speak about. And then it dawned on me that that was the perfect subject
to address: overcoming fear in order to get to your goal or your dream.
Aha! I thought, perfect. But then of course I was crippled with the fear
of talking about my fear!
I tried to find other people's
stories to illustrate what I know about dealing with fear, but couldn't
really remember any of them well enough to borrow them. I thought of
hiring someone to write my speech for me,but then they'd know everything
about me! I even tried to find another subject to speak about. But then
I realized I was doing that actor thing of trying to find something to
hide behind – that's what we do as actors: we tell the truth by
pretending to be someone else. But I knew this was not the occasion for
that. So I've finally managed to quell my fears, and put the actor in me
aside in order to share with you how I got to be an actor in the first
place.
I would like to dedicate this talk to my sister,
who is struggling at this very moment with figuring out her purpose. (I
have 3 sisters so hopefully I am not calling anyone out!). I've meant to
call, I've meant to write a long email... Modern lifestyles can draw us
so far away from the ones we love most, and it seems like the more ways
there are to communicate, the harder it is for us to really do so. So
by sharing this with you today, I hope to kill two birds with one stone.
Dreams.
The dictionary defines a dream as a series of thoughts, images, and
sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep or relaxation. The
dreaming I would like to speak to is a glimpse of the thing you want to
do that would make you feel most alive. A dream as a portal to your
purpose.
My dream was to be an actor from when I was very
little, but I didn't always know it. Before I could call myself an
actress I had a lot of work to do: I had to unchain myself from
indecision, cut through the fear of going after my dream, jump over my
own ego and allow myself to be vulnerable and confront a great deal of
Imposter Syndrome.
1. UNCHAINING FROM INDECISION
The first step to becoming an actor was to
choose it for myself. Now, I am
very indecisive;
I'm a Pisces, I am astrologically predisposed to not being able to make
up my mind, I admit that. But finding out that I wanted to be an actor
was made a little more difficult because I grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, in
the 80s when acting was just not a viable career path.
Though
I loved to perform and make believe when I was little, nobody I knew in
my immediate surrounding acted for a living. In school it wasn't one of
the professions we learned about either (there was lawyer,doctor,
businessman, secretary, policeman, politician, teacher – no actor on the
list!). It didn't help also that at that time in the 80s we only had
one TV station, owned by the state, which aired extremely boring
programming for a child – government propaganda: We witnessed things
like which school the president had visited and distributed packets of
milk, which church he had attended that Sunday. So my primary access to
the world of performance became the cassette tapes of dubbed American TV
that my cousins brought back with them. I was enraptured by things like
Kids Incorporated,
Menudo, and
Different Strokes.
But the characters all spoke in a strange accent and lived in a faraway
land called America. In the 90s we got our second TV station which
aired 95% of foreign programming: I watched
Rosa Salvage from Mexico,
Neighbours from Australia,
East Enders
from the UK. So while my imagination grew and my passion for
performance expanded, it still was not a reflection of what I could
realistically dream for myself.
But when I watched the
Color Purple
and saw Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah in it, a seed was planted in my heart
to be an actor, but I dared not water it in public. Back then, acting
was not considered an honorable profession in Kenya, especially for a
politicians daughter. It was a thing that children and grown-up children
did. I pursued acting opportunities in school all the same, and as long
as it was extra-curricular and not my focus, I felt it was safe and
acceptable. Mind you my parents put no pressure on me to want to be one
thing or another, but it was the expectation from the larger society
that kept me ashamed of the truth about what the desire of my heart
really was. Soon enough, I was in such self-denial that I really
believed that I did not want to be an actor. Then what
did I want to be?
As
I grew older, I grew more and more confused about what I wanted for
myself. And at some point in my adolescence, the question, “What do you
want to be when you grow up,” seemed to be the only one on every
grown-up slips. (There is this pressure for us to define ourselves as
one thing from so early on; a pressure I do not agree with. We can and
should be allowed to be more than one thing, especially when we are
children.) Anyway, I took to answering that question spontaneously, in
the hopes that I would land on goldmine truth one day by accident and
finally know what my life was to be about. Entertainment lawyer, botanist, archaeologist, nothing felt right though.
By
the time I got to undergrad, Hampshire College in the US, I was still
looking for the “practical,” “useful,” “viable” career path, the
profitable type, the assured type. I went for the closest thing to
acting: film studies because I figured wanting to hold a camera was more
serious than wanting to play in front of it. But I continued to act
after school. And once that chapter was done, though I had learned a lot
and had been passionate about my education, I did not yet feel like I
was in the right gear of my life.
I moved back to Kenya in
a state of personal crisis, still wondering what my life was to be
about. I was disappointed that at age 25 I was still feeling lost and
unfocused. And I was worried that at the rate I was going I would never
figure it out. My indecision and self-denial were becoming healthy
breeding grounds for fear.
I sought advice from people I
looked up to in Kenya, and as they dispelled their advice to me, I sat
there totally envious of their clarity of mind and their ability to
pursue their dreams. Why couldn't I be like them? I coveted their
dreams: When I met with a director, I wanted to be a director,when I met
with a producer, I wanted to be a producer, I even met with a copyright
lawyer and thought that might be a dream for me! I looked for all sorts
of jobs, as a journalist, tv anchor, MC. Nothing worked and nothing
stuck.
“When people don't do what they want, they don't know what to do,”
-said Marty Rubin.
There was no saving me from the agony of indecision until I stopped running away from myself and listened
to myself.
I took a time out to silence the voices, stop the chatter and really
think about what would make me happy. I admitted it, first to myself and
then out loud, that what I really wanted, more than anything was to
make-believe for a living. I wept when I did so, because it was so hard
to admit that I wanted to be something so improbable and impractical for
a Kenyan like myself. It felt like a lofty, pipe dream really,but deep
down I was overjoyed because I was finally speaking the truth about what
made me feel most alive. And it wasn't real until I shared it. John
Lennon put it best:
“A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.”
Once it is uttered and you have taken ownership of it, the destination is taken care of and the journey can begin.
Then
I got down to the most important work: figuring out what steps would
get me to being the actor I wanted so badly to be. I had a plan of
action, something to work towards: Getting into the Yale School of Drama
for acting training.
2. CUTTING THROUGH FEAR
To
go after my goal to attend the School of Drama meant that I would have
to confront my fear of failure, of not being good enough. I knew it was a
great acting program and I wanted the best education possible if I was
to really give this acting thing a fair shot. But I felt inexperienced.
We
didn't even have a theater library in Kenya. For the audition, I worked
with one monologue I knew from a speech class I had taken when I was 12
years old and another from Juliet whom I had played when I was 14. Mind
you I was 25 at this point! I had no other choices and so I made do.As I
boarded the plane to the US, there were naysayers in my head telling me
I was crazy, that I shouldn't even bother: over 900 people auditioned
for 15spots each year. And yet there was a part of me that knew I could
do it, even when the part of me that said it was impossible was louder.
Our dreams arise from our imaginations, they belong to us and we owe it
to ourselves to try and realize them. To encourage myself, I wrote in my
diary on 23 August 2008,
“I have this dream
and desire [to be an actor] and yet it dwarfs me – but it's MY dream,
God dammit – I made it up!! How can what I dreamed up defeat ME?!”
3. JUMPING OVER EGO, EMBRACING VULNERABILITY
And
then I got in to Yale, this prestigious school where acting
heavyweights like Meryl Streep and Angela Bassett had learned their
craft (Meryl is so legendary at Yale that we referred to her just as The
Streep). I was overjoyed. This was a gift I was given: the opportunity
to immerse myself in my craft, surrounded by people of equal and greater
talent.They had accepted me and I had to prove to them and to myself
that I deserved to be there.
I couldn't afford to fail. I
had traveled too far for that and I had defied what was expected of me
in my community. Too much was at stake; my dream was in motion and very
much in my own hands now. And I had every intention to work hard and
excel at everything I did. But I would very quickly learn that in acting
school, things weren't that straightforward.Acting is not like math
where there is only one correct answer to the problem and once you
figure out the formula you are all set. In acting, like in
life,sometimes coming up with the wrong answer to a problem is the best
way to figure out the formula for yourself. In acting school you are
expected to fail and fail publicly a lot. It is the constant exposure to
failure that frees you from the strongholds of the ego and allows you
to embrace your vulnerability,and it is in embracing your vulnerability
that you can surprise yourself in performance and share something really
special about human nature.
I will give you an example:
Imagine now that you have been singled out from this group, just as you
are. You are told that your goal is to make everybody laugh. The
instructions are to leave the room and return with enthusiasm and do
something great, without having a clue what that might be and show it to
the audience without words, props or anything. Now I don't know about
you but that terrifies me, especially because laughter is the one
emotion an audience never lies with; they only give it to you when they
are really tickled. This was an exercise from a Clown class at Yale. Not
the painted face,red nose, big shoes and baggy trousers clown of the
circus, but the simple,innocent fool that lives inside all of us. The
child within us that we've spent most of our lives trying to hide under
layers of intelligence, sensibility,sophistication and social cool. The
one who gets great joy in making others happy and finds the fun in
simple things like a light bulb going on and off and is horrified by the
pop of a balloon.
There is nothing as embarrassing and
uncomfortable as trying to make people laugh and hearing nothing but
silence in response. When it was my turn to go up, I tried all sorts of
bafoonery: flapping my arms like a bird,rolling on the floor, I ran
around and jumped up and down – I didn't believe I was funny enough and I
was desperate to find something to hide behind, I was fresh out of good
ideas, and there had still been no laughter. Eventually, my teacher,
Chris Bayes, called me out, he said, “You've failed, Lupita, haven't
you?” And at that point I let it all go and broke down and cried
audibly. It was only then that everyone in the room burst out laughing,
because I had finally allowed myself to be honest and truly open with
them. My inner fool came out to play only once I had put my ego aside.
And
so it was not until I had opened myself up to the possibility of
failing that I was able to find success in clown class. Without the
possibility of being bad, you will never be extraordinary. And so I
resolved to operate from a sense of self that was louder than my critic
and faster than my worry. It is only in that space that you can truly be
free and innovate.
4. CONFRONTING IMPOSTER SYNDROME
Right
before I graduated, the opportunity to play Patsey was offered to me.
After a rigorous audition period, when Steve McQueen, the director,
called me to give me the part, I remember I sat down on the pavement
overjoyed and horrified by the prospect of working alongside such
seasoned artists. It was a dream come true, but the saboteur in me would
have me believe that it had come true too fast and that I was not
prepared for it. I was suffering from typical Imposter Syndrome: a
pattern of toxic thoughts that tell you how lucky you are to have
everybody fooled that you are good at what you do up until now. Your
cover is about to be blown this time and they will know that you are
nothing but an imposter of talent.
This was to be my first
film and judging by the story and the people involved, I knew it was no
small potatoes. I couldn't possibly getaway with this one. It was a big
deal and I... wasn't. I felt small, like an underdog, dwarfed by
everyone else in it. I had no experience working on this scale, I
thought. How was I supposed to act alongside Mr. Kinky Boots, Mr.
Magneto and Troy himself! Who was I? I was certain Steve had made a
mistake, and that he would fire me any day now. This was a REAL fear of
mine. It kept me up at night – in fact I did not have a good night's
rest from the day I got offered the role to the day I got wrapped on
set.
Before I left to shoot the film, I reached out to a
close friend and classmate of mine. I asked her where all that abandon
and courage had disappeared to from all my time at Yale. What had I
learned and why wouldn't it show up to me when I needed it most? My
friend breathed with me – a good friend does that. and then she reminded
me that it was all there, that I needed to trust in myself in order for
what I had learned to serve me. Patsey's point of view had to matter to
me more than my own. She reminded me to lead not with my fear but with
my hope. When you are living 'on purpose,' the limited size of your
human experience has got nothing to do with it.
You see,
when we are fearful, we spend more time worrying about things that don't
yet exist and very little on building on what already does. The
solution is not to eradicate fear – that would be nice but fear does
play a role in keeping us safe. The solution is to recognize fear with
compassion and act IN SPITE of it. That is what courage is after all:
doing the thing you fear because what you are to gain is worth the risk.
Playing Patsey in
12 Years A Slave was worth the risk.
5. NOW
The aftermath of
12 years
was something I could not have foreseen. I definitely expected it to be
an important film and a fantastic starting point for me in my
professional experience, but I never expected to receive all the
recognition and accolades that came with it. As such, I had to make
space in my heart to receive all the good stuff, and this was not easy. I
had had a life of believing I was afraid of failure and now here I was
faced squarely with the fear of success. I was afraid of success because
I did not know what might lie on the other side of it. With success
comes an added expectation and with that comes lofty responsibility.
Lately, I have been afraid of not being able to handle all these new
expectations. I have been afraid that my weaknesses have no place in the
world of this new found success,that I have to become a super-version
of me to keep up with the versions of myself that stare back at me from
magazine covers.
To the world, I have achieved the
pinnacle of success in my field, and yet I still have the rest of my
life to go. It is at this point that I have to constantly remind myself
of how I got here: through hard work, daring to dream, and
systematically slaying the dragons that are Self-Doubt, Self-Hate and
Self-Denial. I must carry on on my personal journey and dream more,
dream again. This new chapter of my life will be different but it will
take rising upto the same dragons again. They disguise themselves every
time but they are exactly the same, and I must ultimately trust that my
life has equipped me with all the tools and weapons I need to deal with
them.
Your life is equipping you with all you need to slay
your dragons & realize your dreams and your goals. More and more
women are coming alive, diversifying their career paths, defying the
narrow expectations the world has in place for them. We continue to
fight for equality, for justice,for freedom, for compassion. And we
achieve the most when we are awakened &responsive to the desires of
our individual hearts. It is then that we can really be a part of a
whole and share our tools to fulfill the bigger picture of a better
tomorrow.
Seven tools I offer to you today are:
- Recognize
and articulate your fear to yourself . Then look for what you love and
articulate that to yourself and to others. Do so often and your love
will grow stronger than your fear.
- Reach out to your
stretcher-bearers:This is a concept I have carried with me from a Bible
teaching in high school.It speaks of a time when Jesus was teaching a
crowd of people that had come from all over. Some men came late carrying
their paralysed friend on a stretcher.I t was so crowded around Jesus
that they went up on the roof , made an opening in the tiles and
lowered the man into the middle of the group in front of Jesus. When
Jesus saw how much faith and love they had, he cured the man of his
paralysis. My teacher in her message encouraged us to make sure we had
those stretcher-bearers in our lives (at least four), who would carry
us to healing and safety when we could not do it ourselves. The people
who will remind you that you are not alone when your emotions get the
better of you, remembering that “Our pain is when we perceive ourselves
as separate” (Tara Brach).
- Ask questions of yourself, for
yourself, and listen out for the answers all around you. Take reading
recommendations from people you respect: It was in sitting through a
talk back with a documentary filmmaker that I learned of the book "Fight
Your Fear & Win" by Don Greene, and it very literally got me
through my crisis before I got to Yale. That, and "Map For Life", a life
management book by Glen McQuirk that my mother insisted I use for over
5 years before I finally did so and never regretted it. I go back to
these books often.
- Do not underestimate the power of writing your dreams and goals down. Right before I got cast in 12 Years,
I was envisioning what kind of work I wanted to do. I wrote in my
diary on May 4th 2012, that I wanted “To make meaningful films that
affect change in people's understanding of and commitment to the world
we live in.” I also wrote that I wanted to visit New Orleans for at
least a week. On May 13th I booked 12 Years A Slave and on June 6th I would be in Louisiana working on the film for 5 weeks.
- Breathe.
Meditate. Pray. Be still with your soul. There is a force within us
that unites us, surrounds us, penetrates us and binds us together – and
I'm not just saying that because I am in Star Wars – its true!
- Go
for it and always allow failure to be an option: “True Freedom is
being without anxiety about imperfection,” says zen master Seng-tsan.
And right now I am learning to deeply value my human right to be
imperfect. No matter who we are or what stage of achievement we are at,
I think that it is healthy to always have some perfection to work
towards.It gives us perspective and also gives us something worth
living another day for.
- Finally, Step forward and repeat it
all: with each new step you take, with each new challenge you face,
expect yourself to learn these lessons again and again. Do not be
disappointed in yourself when it feels like this time it is harder or
different – it will always be harder or different if you are growing.
When you feel overwhelmed by this, remind yourself that you feel
despair because you still care. Step and repeat, step and repeat. It
doesn't ever get comfortable, but it does get familiar. photo: Lisa Lake/Getty Images