Viola Davis has a message for Black women who feel they must carry every burden alone. After battling shingles twice, the Oscar-winning actress is speaking about the excruciating pain that changed how she approaches her health.
The hardest thing Viola Davis said about having shingles was not about shingles at all.
“I think a lot of times we have that sort of need to be strong and to be invincible all the time,” she said. “There’s not going to be anyone there to catch us.” She called that the Black woman’s narrative, and she said she had been living inside it.
Davis has had shingles twice. The first came about a decade ago, and she had never heard of it. “I remember I was just surprised,” she said. “It never occurred to me that I had shingles, but then I didn’t know anything about it.”
The pain is the part she describes in the plainest terms. “Extremely excruciating,” she said. “It’s one of those pains that even when I touched my back or touched myself, it was just excruciating pain.” It was hard to put her clothes on. “It just leveled me.”
What changed was not her body. It was what she did about it. “I would go to the doctor, but only if I had to,” she said. Now she goes. “So, going to the doctor became my teacher.”
She put the rest as an instruction rather than a confession. “That’s actually the most radical thing that you can do,” she said, “because I guarantee you, by the time you go to the doctor, you already know something is wrong.” The point, she said, is not to work it out alone. “The thing about it is, you go to the people who do know. That’s what you do. You go to the people who do know.” That is why she bothered her doctor. “That’s what they’re there for.”
The line that answers the one she opened with is the shortest thing she said. “You’re gonna be the one that you catch.”
She tied it to what a woman believes she is worth. “When you imagine, as soon as you have self-worth, you see your body as this beautiful temple,” she said. “I honor all of it. Whenever I’m going through anything, I go to a doctor, and that’s all around too.”
