Orange Is the New Black’s Danielle Brooks Once Considered Suicide: I had three strikes against me: I was too dark, too curly, and too fat. [VIDEO]

Danielle Brooks

Danielle Brooks who plays the highly entertaining role as Tasha “Taystee” Jefferson on Orange Is the New Black, wasn’t always comfortable with her appearance. In a recent essay with Glamour, the 25-year-old Julliard graduate shares how both her skin color, hair texture and weight have made her self conscious and insecure — until now. Danielle reveals how she’s grown to love herself, despite not many Hollywood actresses looking like her. Peep a few excerpts.

Considering suicide:

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.

When she started to become self conscious about her weight:

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.

Other women in Hollywood not looking like her:

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?

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