”And as a Girl Scout, when my troop would go to dinner for a big celebration, it was back to that same salad bar or The Old Spaghetti Factory – because that’s what those families could afford.”
Things changed when her dad won $750,000 in the lottery. Her half-brother said it helped put Meghan on the path she’d later walk with such fierce focus.
Early hustle, Hollywood dreams
Even as a kid, Meghan dreamed big. At 11, she wrote a letter to her principal promising to make their school famous once she made it.
She wasn’t kidding. By 13, she was working jobs from babysitting to slinging donuts at a stand called Little Orbit. Her work ethic never stopped.
Meanwhile, she found love for acting while hanging out on the set of Married… with Children, where her dad worked as a lighting director.
“A really funny and perverse place for a little girl in a Catholic school uniform to grow up,” she laughed.
But teenage Meghan was still figuring out who she was.
”I wasn’t black enough”
“My teens were even worse — grappling with how to fit in,” she wrote in a blog post years later. “Being biracial, I fell somewhere in between.”
She also faced challenges early in her acting career, partly because she was seen as “ethnically ambiguous.” As she put it, “I wasn’t black enough for the black roles and I wasn’t white enough for the white ones.”
By her twenties, the pressure to look and act perfect took its toll.
At 33, though, things shifted.
