Danielle Brooks is promoting the third seasion of Orange is the New Black. I’m looking forward to the show’s return and will try not to binge it too hard. (CB tried to make me watch it faster last time!) Brooks plays the tragic yet triumphant Taystee to a tee. There are so many classically trained actresses on the show, and Brooks is one of them (she graduated from Julliard). She’s 25 years old and broke onto the acting scene a few years ago with OITNB. With the spotlight came a return of her childhood body-image anxieties.

Danielle wrote a heartfelt essay for Glamour on size acceptance, both in Hollywood and in the “real world.” I left out a few paragraphs for brevity’s sake, but you can read the whole piece here. Some excerpts:

Being a teenager can be one of the hardest phases of a person’s life. For me, I struggled every day tricking myself into appearing confident. After reading over old journal entries, I realized some days were less successful than others. I came across one that took me aback. In this entry, I had written about how insecure I was about my weight. I wasn’t able to wear the flared jeans and cute tops the other girls wore–they didn’t come in my size. On top of that, I was dark-skinned and had natural hair. 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.

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.

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.

From that moment on, it was a long road to learning to love myself again. I dreamed of being an actor, but when I looked for reflections of myself on the screen, I found few … Ironically, achieving a measure of success in this field that gave me confidence threatened to shake the very foundation of that hard-earned self-worth. Being in the public eye magnifies my “imperfection” to an insane degree. Attending the Golden Globes for the first time, I was aware that the majority of the other actresses in the audience didn’t look like me. But you see, the average woman is a size 12 to 14. Those actresses don’t look like most women. I’m not saying those actresses should gain 30 pounds, but I am posing the question, that if art is supposed to reflect life then why don’t the red carpets and magazines reflect reality?

[From Glamour]

Danielle goes on to stress that she’s “no longer operating out of a place of fear.” She refuses to hide her body on the red carpet and will show off her arms (and sometimes her midriff) as “a reminder to myself and the world that I know I’m beautiful.” Damn straight, Danielle is gorgeous! Her sense of style is blossoming too. Her SAGs dress was one of my favorites of the evening. And yes, Danielle is correct that Hollywood should take more care to reflect reality in a lot of ways (including body types).

Photos courtesy of WENN