Kerry Washington has a new book out, Thicker Than Water. She was recently interviewed by Krista Tippett on On Being and I have posted a quote worth keeping in mind. It is so true and so hard to remember.

This question of how we become who we are is the most important one right now, because it’s the question, I think, that will allow us to have a bit more humility around the decisiveness of where we can and cannot compromise, where we are alike and where we are dissimilar. If we have the willingness to ask ourselves, how did I become who I am and how did they become who they are? — I think it allows us all to accept more of our messiness and to let ourselves be more human … And I think that’s where we need to be operating more from, the messy humanity of each other. And less from deciding who our enemies are and deciding who’s good and who’s bad.


We have a joke in my family that my favorite genre is a villain origin story because I love those movies where you get to see how the bad guys become the bad guys. Because the truth is, nobody’s born a bad guy but very few of us. Everyone has a wound … and how we process those wounds and move forward through them is who we are.

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