Viola Davis comes from humble beginnings, but even as a small child she knew she was destined for great things.

“I was making my way through it,” the star told People magazine. “You either hope or you don’t. And it was hope and dreams that made me put my feet on the floor every morning and just approach every day with a sense of enthusiasm. It was my fight or flight that kicked in.”

Her father, Dan, struggled to make ends meet, and Viola found support through what she describes as “countless” names and faces, as the outlet reports.

“I can’t tell you how many people have helped me,” she said. “I had a principal and I would come into her office and she would have a paper bag full of clothes. They were hand-me-downs, but they were so cute, the little purses, the A-line skirts.”

One teacher in particular “looked at me one day and said, ‘Viola, do you know you’re an all-American girl?’ ” Davis recalls. “I was like, ‘Me? But I don’t have blonde hair and blue eyes.’ He said, ‘No, you’re an all-American girl. You’re smart, you have all these attributes.’”

“That’s the little girl who follows me all the time,” she added. “I see her every single day I open my big Sub-Zero refrigerator or sit in my Jacuzzi; she’s just standing there squealing. And I always feel like I have to go back and heal that little girl who grew up in poverty, who was called names and ‘ugly’ all the time.”

“I would tell her that she was enough,” she says when asked what she would tell her 13-year-old self.

“I wasted so much time listening to the naysayers. And I just wish I had listened to the other voices of people saying that I was beautiful and talented. I always thought when you listen to that, you’re conceited, but I wish I had listened to that more. I wish I had pranced through the world with just hoity toity confidence and overexuberance.”