When you came you cried and everybody smiled with joy; when you go smile and let the world cry for you.
'YOU are the big drop of dew under the lotus leaf, I am the smaller one on its upper side,' said the dewdrop to the lake.
Being 'ethnically ambiguous', as I was pegged in the industry, meant I could audition for virtually any role. Morphing from Latina when I was dressed in red, to African American when in mustard yellow, my closet filled with fashionable frocks to make me look as racially varied as an Eighties Benetton poster.
I dream pretty big but truly had no idea my life could be this awesome. I am the luckiest girl in the world, without question!
I grew up in L.A. in a school that was diverse, but it was not really integrated, so I didn't ever fully fit in with the black girls or the white girls or the Latina girls.
I never thought I would become an actress. I always wanted to get into politics, and I moved to Argentina and worked for the U.S. embassy for a bit. It sort of happened upon me when I was home for the holiday - acting, that is - and I stuck with it.
I never want to lose touch with reality. I won't push $100 candles just because. I realized that I could create a hub of positivity and affirmation.
I rarely saw my Grandma Markle, as she hailed from New Hampshire and spent much of her life in Pennsylvania and Florida. To bridge that gap, she would always send scrapbooks, care packages, and boxes of treats made from family recipes.
I started working at a soup kitchen in skid row of Los Angeles when I was 13 years old, and the first day, I felt really scared. I was young, and it was rough and raw down there, and though I was with a great volunteer group, I just felt overwhelmed.
I used to be a calligrapher for weddings and events - that was my side job while I was auditioning. I think handwritten notes are a lost art form. When I booked my first pilot, my dad wrote me a letter that I still have. The idea of someone taking the time to put pen to paper is really special.
I was not a girl who grew up buying $100 candles. I was the girl who ran out of gas on her way to an audition.
I went to an all-girls' Catholic school for, like, six years during the time when kids actually had handwriting class. I've always had a propensity for getting the cursive down pretty well.
I'm a California girl, right? I grew up with that farm-to-table dining before it was sweeping the nation.
I'm an actress, a writer, the editor-in-chief of my lifestyle brand 'The Tig', a pretty good cook, and a firm believer in handwritten notes.
I'm consistently asked how I keep a foot in two contrasting worlds - one in the entertainment industry, predicated on wealth and indulgence, and the other in humanitarian work. To me, it's less of a question of how can you do this, and more a question of how can you not?
I'm from L.A., so I'm used to seeing people in sunglasses and flip-flops. There's something so romantic about a man in a scarf and a knitted hat.
It's all about balance, and I have so much happiness in my career and am fortunate to travel the world and see so many amazing things - it will also be nice to be anchored to something grounded and in the same place. Raising a family will be a wonderful part of that.
Just as black and white, when mixed, make grey, in many ways that's what it did to my self-identity: it created a murky area of who I was, a haze around how people connected with me. I was grey. And who wants to be this indifferent colour, devoid of depth and stuck in the middle? I certainly didn't.
Make a choice: continue living your life feeling muddled in this abyss of self-misunderstanding, or you find your identity independent of it. You push for color-blind casting, and you draw your own box. You introduce yourself as who you are, not what color your parents happen to be.
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