If you truly pour your heart into what you believe in, even if it makes you vulnerable, amazing things can and will happen.

I don’t want other people to decide who I am. I want to decide that for myself. I want to avoid becoming too styled and too “done” and too generic. You see people as they go through their career and they just become more and more like everyone else. They start out with something individual about them but it gets lost.

It’s a journey and the sad thing is you only learn from experience, so as much as someone can tell you things, you have to go out there and make your own mistakes in order to learn.

^{“There is certainly a big part of conditioning in society that still very much tells women that the most important thing is their appearance and their bodies and how they look. That’s a very, very strong message. I’m someone who is lucky enough to have gone to school and university. At times, I have just felt so irritated because what ultimately seemed like the most important thing was how I looked. I just thought, ‘Why do I bother?’. It’s changing, and I think women are learning to be valued for what they’re saying, doing and thinking, for who they are. But there’s still some strong messages saying what really matters is how you look in a bikini.”}

“It just always reveals to me how many misconceptions and what a misunderstanding there is about what feminism is. Feminism is about giving women choice. Feminism is not a stick with which to beat other women with. It’s about freedom, it’s about liberation, it’s about equality. I really don’t know what my tits have to do with it. It’s very confusing.”

“I think that it is very important if you know what you want, understand where you are heading towards, and try your best to get it. It is only when we use our hearts to do it, and fall in love with what we are doing, then can we really get real determination.”

It’s exciting to me that people are seeing me in a different way because it means they’re allowing me space to grow and change and they’re having an open mind to the fact there might be other sides of me which they haven’t really seen and that haven’t been explored yet.

With airbrushing and digital manipulation, fashion can project an unobtainable image that’s dangerously unhealthy. I’m excited about the aging process. I’m more interested in women who aren’t perfect. They’re more compelling.

I’ve been very fulfilled by my studies. English has helped me think in an analytical way. It’s helped me see the world from new perspectives. Diving into these stories and characters has given richness to my own life. And now, when I read scripts or look at stories, I have these references for a larger understanding of humanity. I’m sure it will make my job as an actress more interesting. 

If we stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by what we are, we can all be freer.