My name is Jessica Nicole.

I live in Los Angeles.

I am an actor, but I th I have always been really creative and I like using my hands.

And so I've been sewing my clothes, making shoes.

I make furniture, I do reupolstery, I make ceramics.

Yeah, that's kind of how I spend I kind of like to thrust myself into the middle something and just figure it out.

I love to research a lot o I just think, well, if somebody That doesn't mean that I#m good at everything that I try.

But it's pretty remarkable that once you take out the element of, Oh, it has to look great, it has to be monetized, I have to be able to sell this or it has to look a certain way.

Once you kind of get rid of that and you're just losing yourself in the proces It is the most...probably the most fulfilling part of my life.

I don't think that my work in television and film tells you anything about me.

You know, it shows you what I look like and it shows you how I can portray a character.

And maybe you think but it doesn't give you any informatio And so being able to fill the rest of my life with creating things made me feel like I was empowered again.

Ready to wear clothes are not often made for like, as many An d so I would go in the dressing room and I would feel like crap, because you know, what I put on didn't fit very well.

At the same time, the actual people that were creating t these garments, they're not getting paid a living wage and they're being subjected to conditions that no one should be required to work in.

Pretty much everything bad that you could think of was happening.

And these were the stores that I was shopping at.

You shop there because it's cheap and we think of cheap as being not costing a lot, but we don't thi It means that somebody is paying for it and we aren't.

And I wanted to figure out if there was a way for me to continue to love clothing without feeling like it was having this huge negative impact on mostly communities of color, mostly women.

A lot of times children as well.

I had learned to sew years and years and years and I mostly used sewing to like, alter clothing from vintage stores or shorten things, make those kinds of adjustments.

And then I was introduced to this huge online sewing community, which did not exist when I first learned how to sew.

So in the decade plus that I had been away from se there was suddenly a much larger pool of patterns to choose fro Not only that, but there was a lot more size inclusivity.

You could accommodate all the things about your body.

Then I realized my body was never the problem.

The problem was the clothing that was made available to myself and everybody el I really appreciate Instagram because it has fostered a community.

Most people who come up to me on the street know me because of my sewing as opposed to know me because of my work in television and film, which I am very happy about.

I love talking about the process and stuff.

I love sharing my life, and I feel like most o that follow me on Instagram are other people who sew and make things.

But there are a lot of people who just feel inspired just because it can be fun to watch somebody like, you know, get all into the details of what they're interested in.

I feel like there has been a shift in my online presence where you can learn so much about me, seeing me, a black queer woman who is living her life and feeling very proud about who she is and unapologetic about it.

I think that stuff is really, really important for people to see because again, I've been a part of projects where they tried to squash down parts of who I was and so yo You can't squash me down.

All these peop I have a complicated relationship with Alabama.

It's where I come from.

It's where so many people in my f I like who I am.

I like the woman that I've grown into.

And everything that I went through has to be a part of me getting here I lived in a mostly white neighborhood.

I went to a mostly white school.

I felt like everybody knew who I was because I few kids of color and one of even fewer, you know, biracial kids.

And I think that that's one of the reasons that I latched on to theater and performance so much is because I was finally giving people a reason to stare at me.

I was giving them a reason to look at me and in some aspects, I was able to hide behind whatever character or whatever role that I was playing so that it felt a little bit like armor.

It felt like a safe way....you're going to stare at me, th while I am singing a killer soprano part.

When I had dreams about my career and I always knew that I wanted to be an actor, I never connected that to being famous.

To me, being an actor just meant I get to pay all my bills doing something that I love and have fun doing.

And that was really it.

I didn't really th And, you know, there's a lot of people in the world that don't really know what it is that they want t So I felt really lucky to know exactly what it was that I wanted to do.

I try to ask myself periodically, where am I now?

And is there someplace said I want to be?

Or do And that changes all the time.

You know, my body is is getting older, my mind is getti The things that I want are also changing with those things.

I think it's important to try and keep whatever feeds you creatively or artistically, whatever it means to you.

I think it's important to keep going towards that and to try as much as possible to make room for that in your life as an adult.

But the truth is that you do not have to be in a creative field to be an artist or to express yourself in any kind of way.

You are part of this kind of collective consciousness that is trying to make something out of nothing.

I#m trying to bring something into my space that didn't exist there before.

There's a whole world of creative joy and fulfillment very literally at our fingertips.

We just have to shift our thinking a little bit in order to access it and let it really flourish.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7sa7SZ6arn1%2BrtqWxzmihmquZoK5uusicpqWdXaZ9r7zBsGY%3D