I feel every medium of art needs to heal to some degree. It can't live in it's own void, and this came from my earliest experiences as a young refugee.

I felt it's vague enough for the reader to pull their own story and their wisdom out of the poem, but for me, it's actually very painfully transparent what I've written. Sometimes very literal, which is scary.

My experiences there truly defined who I am to this day as far as my humanitarian work because I was a refugee in Albania.

English was my fourth language. I arrived, I enrolled in public school, as a child, I believe I was about six years old when we finally landed in Michigan. And I was initially put in special education because I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the English language because I was listening to Hungarian and Albanian and German. My mind broke down like I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the fourth language.

I'm thinking like the character in order to be as authentic as I can. But after a while, how would I be able to cleanse myself from this unless I do something that's a different medium but also creative. That's what I do. It's my little ritual. After every filming, I just write a poem about it and my character specifically and I can let her go.

I feel every medium of art needs to heal to some degree. It can't live in it's own void, and this came from my earliest experiences as a young refugee.

Being as restless as I am by nature, I couldn't simply just be on set, wait for my turn to rehearse for the week. And I kept reading, but it wasn't enough for me.