I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It's taken me longer still to realize what a short span there is between those life experiences and the rest of your life. That's a job for the people who lived through it.
Every person remembers some moment in their life where they witnessed some injustice, big or small, and looked away because the consequences of intervening seemed too intimidating. But there's a limit to the amount of incivility and inequality and inhumanity that each individual can tolerate. I crossed that line. And I'm no longer alone.
When I started working, I didn't have a clue what I was doing, in that I was just wandering around, hoping that I could succeed. Then after I got a little under my belt, it took me about 25 years to feel like I knew what I was doing.
I had lost a clear sense of the vision and values instilled in me as a child and was no longer driven by any mission or passion. I made the difficult decision to pull back from the noise of my life and reinvent the way I was living and leading.
During my childhood, I felt older than my years because I felt responsible for my brothers and sisters.
I used to watch the world as if it was a performance and I would realize that certain things that people did moved me, and certain things didn't move me, and I tried to analyze, even at that age, six and seven and eight, why I was moved by certain things they did.
My old boyfriend, Warren Beatty, used to say I was a late developer,' she reflects. 'He was right. It took me 50 years to find motherhood and unconditional love.'
The choices of roles I made had to do with educating and entertaining. And as a result I found myself working only every two or three years.
I wonder how often in the past I may have missed the good in people because I pre-judged, based on the differences?
It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.