The people that I admire have a wonderful balance of self-belief and humility.

It felt like it disrupted my rhythm in growing up. But I will say that I'm really grateful for [my mother's] own personal transition.

What inspires me today is a desire to get closer to an understanding of what my artistic capacities are with the hope of organically sharing my gifts with an audience in the most heightened way I possibly can.

I got into [acting] so late because of sports. And then when I was in grad school, I sort of got lulled into basically forgetting I was black, in - meaning that everyone you play at a conservatory, 95 percent of the characters are non-black.

It was really a focus on how to in some ways keep moving in this direction towards something that allowed me to express myself in a way that sports didn't.

When you graduate is when you start to find yourself looking at the information in the audition breakdown and it says tall black African - or African-American built such and such. And you start seeing these character descriptions and seeing that, oh, you're only going in for the ones that are described as your look.

I think in some ways, I would go back home, and I didn't really quite fit in and couldn't - didn't have a person to bounce those experiences off of. So I felt a little bit trapped within me, and it made me feel lonely because I really couldn't - the things that were exciting to me, I couldn't really share those with another kid and that other kid understand that.