Trans actress Laverne Cox has opened up about the responsibility of success and her ongoing survivor's guilt.
She added: "So I felt a lot of survivors’ guilt. A feeling like, Why me?"
Speaking as part of New York magazine's 'Women and Power' series, Cox reflected on her journey from first moving to New York, to breaking boundaries as a trans woman of colour in television.
"Season one of Orange Is the New Black — that was powerful. It changed the way people perceived trans folks, it inspired people to transition," she said.
"But, you know, I moved to New York in 1993 and I shot Orange Is the New Black in 2012. That is 19 years. And in 2009, when I was shooting my own show on VH1, I thought that starring in my own TV show should make all of the pain of my childhood go away. It didn’t."
That's when Cox realised that her happiness and sense of fulfillment was "an inside job".
"There is nothing in the material world that is going to really fill my soul and heal me," she said.
"I have to do that work. That was nine years ago, and I really just started to do a deep dive into the pain and the violence I experienced as a kid. It was time for me to slowly begin to say, 'This happened. This is horrible.'"
It's a lesson she learned from one of her own idols - and hopes to pass on.
"Oprah reminds us that we cannot be in our own power if we do not know who we are."
