Viola Davis grew up in RI. She was poor and black. Two marks against her. Her poverty kept her hungry, without proper sanitation, living in rat infested and crumbling homes, and drowning in violence. Due to her blackness and womanhood the community mistreated her, her family mistreated her, and, in a way, she mistreated herself.

As the title states Ms. Davis spent years seeking to understand herself. She found a path through acting to facilitate her self-discovery but much more than acting was necessary to aid in her self discovery.

She had to put down technique and live from her soul.

To live from the soul is everyone’s charge. This indeed requires self acceptance and love. Someone who settles allowing their significant other to mistreat them needs to grow in self-acceptance and love. Someone who looks at their image in a mirror and refused to see their beauty equally needs to grow in self acceptance and love.

Have we ever really arrived at the destination of complete self-acceptance and love? Perhaps some have yet they are not better off because they have. They reside under the same obligations as one who’s basket of self acceptance and love is empty. For self-acceptance and love must be worked out continuously for everyone.

I read the last chapter in the public library. Tears streamed from my eyes. Ms. Davis wrote about acting in the play FENCES and Denzel Washington asks her to slap another character in the scene who’s playing her son. Her son in the play decided not to attend his father’s, her husband’s, funeral. So she slapped him. The reason she slapped him was to symbolize the importance of reconciling strained family relationships.

I have strained relationships with family members. This part of the book brought out the floods in my eyes and heart.

One can reconcile any relationship if s/he learns to accept and love themself. Self reconciliation is not the only reward for self acceptance and love.