2 
2 I once forgot, oh I let life decide
I didn’t know what was me
Because I was trying to be everything
And all I’d seen was a lie.
—“I Once Forgot,” Keke Palmer
Back when I had just turned ten years old, my parents had made that crucial decision, the one that would have a lasting impact on my entire family’s future (dramatic score, “dun dun DUN!”). My mom and dad decided to move our family from Illinois to California so I could have a better shot at following my dream of being an entertainer.
After my small but significant role in the film Barbershop 2, the producers of the movie encouraged my mom to head west to try my luck in Hollywood. I was so excited by what the future had in store for me that I never gave much thought to the life we were all leaving behind. None of us did.
In our Illinois hometown, my mom had been working as a teacher for mentally disabled children, and my father was working in a polyurethane company where he made plastics and yellow jackets. Only a year and a half before we left Robbins, Illinois, we’d moved into a new home and my dad was so proud. To understand why this was a big deal, you have to understand how segregated Illinois is, or at least it was when I grew up. My dad went to school for communications, but when he was first hired they put him to work in the factory. He had finally worked his way up into the front office—a goal he had had the whole time. After seven years, he had gotten the big promotion he wanted at his job and that enabled him to own our first home! 
Up to that point, we had been in Section 8 housing, living in one of Mr. Williams’s houses in Robbins. Mr. Williams was the grandpa of the neighborhood. But he and my grandma were enemies because apparently when he rebuilt his home, she said he took over half her driveway, and she could never get over it (#PETTY). But the real gag is, when my mom was a kid, he put rat poison on their property without telling my grandma, and my mom’s cousin ended up eating it. So ever since then, they never got along. When he would try to say hello in the morning, she would give him the look that Ice Cube’s mom gave that lady in Friday. 
Now we had a nice home, in a good neighborhood, in a house that was under my father’s name. He had finally done all he had set out to do! 
He had just been ordained as a church deacon; he was the man.
Fast-forward a year or so and we were all packing to leave that new home that my father had worked so hard to secure. Our move meant my parents would have to walk away from their careers and the only lives they’d ever known. It meant my older sister, Loreal, would need to say good-bye to longtime friends just as she was set to enter high school (freshman YEAR? #WHOA). The twins were still babies, still too young to even understand how their lives were being turned upside down too. 
SETTING THE STAGE 
For better or worse I’ve always been in tune with my feelings, as well as the feelings of those around me. When I came across the word empath, I felt I finally figured out that that was a gift. Here’s a definition I found: “someone who is highly tuned to and affected by the feelings of others to the point that their lives can even be influenced unconsciously by other people’s thoughts and emotions.” That translates to this for me: I’m highly sensitive to the world around me. Even when I was a kid, it was an affinity for other people’s feelings that inspired me to do something good in the world. Pretty much, I feel everything! Often to an extreme! Those feelings overwhelmed me a lot in my youth, but now I’m realizing that just because I feel it doesn’t mean I need to succumb to it. My mom always tells the story about when I was five years old, running out of my room crying and screaming. She was so alarmed—she just knew that someone had killed a family member or worse. I yelled, “THEY KILLED MUFASA!” hahahahah. I had just been watching The Lion King and couldn’t believe they took Simba’s father away from him. I think that was the first time my parents saw the depth of my empathic nature. I was always so moved by the feelings of others, even when watching television or movies. Any time Selena came on, my family wouldn’t even tell me. They knew I would start crying and hugging the TV. I was all dramatic because I couldn’t handle that the reality was she was gone. For REAL for real, not fake like MUFASA. 
As a kid, and even today, I can look at someone and pick up on their energy. It’s not about me knowing every little detail about their life, but I feel their disposition about life. What people give us on the surface, whether it be docile or bubbly, is just a little bit of who they are. Usually there’s just so much more under that. Even when they seem like assholes, we have to try to show them something different because clearly they’ve gotten this whole deal confused. #ITSNOTPERSONAL. When I meet someone mean, and they’re lashing out at me—I try (verrrry hard 
) not to lash out back. Because I know their energy toward me is them perpetuating their reality of what’s underneath. Meaning it’s just a defense mechanism to whatever vulnerability they aren’t expressing. And the only way to combat it is to bring love into the forefront.
Love is the real reality, but pain has a way of making you forget that. Pain is a part of life, it is not a personal attack. You can hold yourself back if you don’t see life as a benevolent force and pain as an opportunity to grow. We can all act from that place of loving consciousness—as a kid I would look at my mom and feel that she was sad about something. I felt it was because of the music industry. The music industry was unkind to her, like it could be unkind to a lot of people, because only a small percentage of singers have commercial success and commercial success is made to seem like it’s the only success. I knew she wanted more for her life and for her children. That is how my mother discovered my talents. When my mom saw me singing, not only did it make her happy, she saw that I had a genuine love for music too. I loved how my family and I have a special connection with the arts, and watching the positivity spread between my family and me over the connection we shared.
My dad was an entertainer too. He got accepted to UCLA and didn’t even go. He felt he had to stay back and take care of my grandma. It was hard for him to leave his family behind without feeling selfish. I could tell my dad was always trying to be so much for everyone, and that can weigh on a person. Both my parents were the youngest in their families and to me it seemed like everyone depended on them. My mom and dad had this bond in common. They held each other up. I wanted to be part of that bond and I also felt isolated because of it.
My parents, like many people, went through life with dreams unrealized. As they began having kids and building a home, that became their main focus. I wonder how their lives might have been different if they had had parents like me, for instance? Now I know how much they loved me, considering the opportunities they gave me that they didn’t have for themselves. But sometimes, back then, it was hard to understand the ways they were (or weren’t) communicating. They didn’t know how to express their love in ways I could relate to. They were about the practical—keeping the roof over our heads, and making sure I had a platform for achieving my dreams—but I was just wanting a hug and a kiss. I can still remember days when my mom’s mind seemed a million miles away while my sister and I played games in our rooms. My dad was often distant as well, and whereas I could talk with my mother some of the time, my father’s guard never seemed to come down.
California was going to change all that, I just knew it! 
We drove four days and three nights to California in our Dodge Caravan. The twins were barely potty-trained, so it was hell on wheels that ride! 
When we finally got into town it took forever for us to find a hotel we could afford that wasn’t a motel. My parents took out all the money they had, including my father taking out his pension, so that we would have the money to move. This was a big deal because he had worked for that company for years, and for them to draw from his pension for us to start this new life in California was a huge sacrifice. That’s how my dad showed his love—sacrificing—and sometimes I couldn’t comprehend that as a kid. Each and every step of the way, whether it was leaving all his family behind, giving up his job to stay at home, and sacrificing the way he appeared to the outside world because of it, he sacrificed his own feelings in order to do what he thought was best for my family. My dad’s back still hasn’t recovered from that drive. I remember when I was twelve him going to get cortisone shots until his body became numb to it. Even so, we were never prepared for the culture shock that is California. I will never forget the first hotel that we stayed in—the moment our skin touched the covers we all started itching! And let’s not even get on what we saw when we turned on the television. 
Honestly though, we were happy—at least, I know us kids were. I loved having all that time to be around my dad and my mom, to have their undivided attention, and all of us in the same room.
We bounced around until we found our hotel home for most of our first year, the St. George Inn and Suites in Tarzana. After a week of being in California, I got an agent, and I also landed a Kmart commercial, which allowed us some breathing room financially. Again, it was music that broke open the door! They wanted the kids to sing the Kmart theme song: “Right here, right now, there is no other place I want to be. Right here, right now, this is the place I want to be. Right here, right now, Kmart.” WOOO! I got so happy, and I thought, Hell yeah, I’ve got this. I’ve got a real chance of doing this. After calling us in, they gave us fifteen minutes to go out and learn the song. I told my momma, I’m going to get this! And she just started laughing. She loved when I came at her with that confidence.
When they called me back in, I did the song and added my own twists. When I left the room, little did I know that the casting director literally followed me out shouting, “WOW! I can’t believe your daughter. She’s FEARLESS! She rocked this audition.” Everyone in the waiting room was shocked. Their mouths dropped! We knew then I got the role, because he had said the magic word—Sing!
We hit the ground running in Los Angeles and quickly found regular work in television films like The Wool Cap with William H. Macy. As I mentioned earlier, I received a SAG nomination for that and that success led to the film that in many ways changed my career and life—Akeelah and the Bee.
Later I got a role in Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion and with Ice Cube in The Longshots, movies that really were great strides toward the career I imagined. I was having a blast, and the other really great thing about being in Akeelah was that it put me around kids, lots of kids, for the first time in a long time, and man was that fun for me!
When I was back in Illinois, I’d been living a more regular life, so of course I was surrounded by kids all the time. That all changed with our move to Los Angeles. I was being homeschooled by my mom and my world pretty much consisted of my mom and me, day in and day out, my siblings when I was in town, and a few actor kids every now and then whenever I worked on a set.
Mom would take me to auditions as often as possible and then we would spend time going over lines and studying for my next role. For Akeelah, since my mom loved that script so much, my entire family would do table readings of the film, with my sister and dad playing different roles. She even had the idea to help me learn the lines by running our own spelling bees with my sister and me. Whoever won got some snack money that they’d take across the street to buy candy with. 
We had so much fun rehearsing and I really liked that undistracted time with my mom, but that didn’t happen as often as I would have liked without acting being involved.