To really be conscious of how long the journey is, be patient, push yourself, persevere and always be working on your craft while waiting for your break.

My experiences growing up - my father lived in New York, so I was going out there in the summers and meeting really interesting people and people having what seemed to me to be extraordinary experiences and really taking advantage of these wonderful opportunities. And so I will go - I would go to the big city and watch these people performing onstage and doing television and films. And then I would go back to Hayward, and it just suddenly felt that much smaller and sort of limiting because I had this hyper awareness of how much larger the world was.

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 never wanted to accept that. And so I have always fought against that in some way, shape or form and had - I've had people who have supported trying to get me in for things that were beyond the character description.

Anyone who grew up in the crack era - you know, I grew up in that era - knew that there were also people out - and there are still guys to this day that are out there, you know, obviously drug dealing - but those were the guys who had access and had money. And some of those guys felt responsible to create opportunity for other people and were also aware of the dangers of their work and often aren't really the ones that are encouraging kids to get into drug dealing.

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.

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