Orange Is The New Black star Danielle Brooks is a fan favorite, but the actress admits that growing up in South Carolina with dreams of stardom had its challenges.
In a soul-bearing new essay for Glamour, the Julliard graduate details her body image insecurities and struggles to accept herself as a dark-skinned, natural-haired girl.
“By the standard definition of beauty I had absorbed from the world around me, I had three strikes against me: I was too dark, too curly, and too fat,” she writes in the magazine. Brooks also confesses that at times she went to dark places that threatened to swallow her whole.
She writes,
Because of this insecurity, I was desperately unhappy. I was even having suicidal thoughts. But you wouldn’t have known it. The world saw a young teenage girl who was happy in her skin, laughed a lot, and didn’t care what anyone thought about her. The truth of the matter was I wasn’t happy in my skin; I laughed to hide my pain, and cared deeply what my peers thought of my appearance — to the point that I even was having suicidal thoughts. But you wouldn’t have known it.
The 25-year-old goes on to share an anecdote about the first time she was informed that there was something “wrong” with her body.
I didn’t always feel so self-conscious. As a young girl, I was always a healthy kid but never a skinny kid. I didn’t know that there was anything “wrong” with my body until I was in middle school and a woman from church felt the spirit move her to tell me. As I walked home from Bible study one Wednesday night, she stopped me and exclaimed, “Danielle you’ve got stretch marks on your arms!” and proceeded to take her pointer finger and identify the four or five tiny lines that were starting to form. She continued, “You’re too young to be getting stretch marks,” though she was covered in them herself. And that’s when the cycle of judging myself began.
Eventually, she embarked on what she calls a “long road to learning to love myself again,” and it was her love of art and her craft that kept her focused. “I dreamed of being an actor, but when I looked for reflections of myself on the screen, I found few. Still, I found inspiration in the words of Sharon Flake and the music of India Arie. I took acting classes, where I felt free and accepted.”
The fame that comes with her breakout role in the Netflix hit series has tested her hard-earned body confidence at times — but she can finally say she’s in a good place. Her new hope is to pay it forward.
“Ideally, I want to see all beauties, all shapes, all sizes, all skin tones, all backgrounds represented in my profession,” she writes. “Now that I am blessed to be that reflection I was once looking for, I’m making a promise to speak out for that little girl that I used to be.”