EPISODE 28: PARISA FITZ-HENLEY
PARISA FITZ-HENLEY
On observing your shortcomings, eating like a kid, and the experience of being a Black woman in rural South Carolina.
Parisa Fitz-Henley is an actress, writer and producer, who has been in a zillion episodes of television. You know her from Luke Cage, Midnight, Texas, The Sinner, and so much more. She also played Meghan Markle in the Lifetime movie Harry & Meghan: A Royal Romance.
QUOTES FROM THIS EPISODE
23:00 ~ “Something that I've noticed throughout my career is that when I feel internally that I've reached a place where I've either learned a thing or I'm ready to learn something, something falls into my path that gives me an opportunity to exercise whatever that thing is. And I'm learning to kind of sense that more and kind of sense even the feeling in my body of the space where... something's coming... Exciting things follow large, difficult things, and there's just kind of a balancing that I see in my life and I think a lot of people, when we look at the way our lives go, we notice that there are certain trends. And it doesn't mean you can control everything in your life because you know what the trends are... But it does help to give a sense of peace and acceptance of what's happening and of the waves that come and go.”
50:54 ~ "Observing some of your shortcomings in that way can be helpful... So that you can you can kind of see where other people are coming from at different times and you see how similar you are, which is humbling... I mean, I can think of everything that's hurt me that someone else has done. I'm sure I've done some flavor of [that] to someone else [or] to myself. And trying to remember that and think compassionately about them, while still holding on to justice - because that's important too, like you can't say like, ‘oh well... I've done that thing too, so I deserve to be in pain or stolen from or whatever the thing is.’ ... I think cultivating the practice of just observing yourself really does help you to remember, when you see things in other people, that you're both human.”
46:57 ~ “It makes me happy when I see somebody doing something great.”
56:37 ~ “I think so many of us, women in particular, are encouraged to enmesh ourselves with people, in particular, if we love them.”
1:05:18 ~ “I would never want to take someone else's assessment of the world away from them - unless they were hurting people. That's a whole other story.”
1:07:08 ~ “This is the thing: white supremacy is near the root of what's wrong with the United States. But I think under it is this global disease of the ignorance of the oneness of humanity. So only because of that [disease] can you convince people of things like... this color is better than that one, or this caste is better than this one, or this person with this hair or this person born on this side of this line versus this side... We all have the same disease. It's just manifesting in different ways. One of the most virulent and really widely harmful ways is white supremacy and how it affects everything that the United States does... Our greatness as a nation is debatable, depending on how you're looking at it, but our ability to impact the world is massive.”
1:14:37 ~ “No one gets out of a situation like [enslavement] unscathed. So when we said, as a country, ‘hey, it's over, it's illegal now.’ You think people who witnessed rapes for two, three, four hundred years were fine after that? No one was fine after that. And yet we we’re here wondering, ‘how is it that someone could see these atrocities and just... look the other way? How is it that they can see that people are dying of covid and they won't wear a mask?’ We've learned it... It is a part of the legacy of the massive inhumanity that this country was built on. Still, doesn't mean this country doesn't have hope.”
1:40:26 ~ “Art is spirit embodied.”
1:46:25 ~ “I think the more that we understand that gender is not just something that's bound by the physical, we realize there's a very spiritual aspect to it. There's a sacred aspect to it... it's expressed in way more ways than just what you wear and what your role is in a household.”