Megan Follows makes her home in Los Angeles now where she is busy acting for live theatre, television and in movies.

I love shedding who I am, freeing myself from the limitations of my specific story and inhabiting someone else’s life.

I believe in seeing the world through others’ eyes. That must be why I am an actress.

I love shedding who I am, freeing myself from the limitations of my specific story and inhabiting someone else’s life. From a nurse fighting for justice to a stage mother fighting for her child’s talent to be heard, I have been fortunate enough to embrace, if only for the run of a play or a movie, a different point of view. The challenge is having to embrace points of view that seem so different from my own. To find empathy with a woman who leaves her children for what she sees as the greater emancipation of womankind; to find compassion for a mother who takes her own child’s life forces me to set aside my personal beliefs, to look beyond the obvious wrong so that I may find the humanity within actions that may seem so inhumane. I believe that somewhere between right and wrong, somewhere between black and white, we can achieve a greater understanding of others’ lives.

I believe in the power of make-believe to enrich my life by allowing me to explore someone else’s. Because it’s in the power of inhabiting another’s beliefs that I might get a glimmer of empathy. It can allow me to find compassion for those I find I am in opposition to.

Professionally, I’m onstage, or in front of the camera. But I also love taking pictures. I have had the opportunity to travel widely, and I take my camera wherever I go. Pictures let me see people, objects, landscapes, in relation to each other. I was in Cambodia in March, and I had spent a day photographing children, most of who lived on the streets. Some of the children found work at the local garbage dump. It was extremely hot, humid and dusty as I rode in the back of a tuk-tuk, an open aired cab pulled by a moped. The heat was intense like the city, like the children’s faces I’d been collecting, fragments, smiles, laughs, questioning stares. They seemed to ask: “Why do you want my picture… it will cost a dollar”. Taking pictures, and thinking about taking pictures, trains my mind and my heart to see, within a face or a pattern of light, the familiar in a sometimes completely foreign place. As a photographer, I capture a moment, suspended, before it dissolves. Although suspended, these moments animate my sense of belonging, of participating in not just my life, but in a greater community. It allows me yet another way of seeing the world through different eyes.

When things get tough or uncomfortable, I can be tempted to look away—to not have the courage to see the world through unfamiliar eyes. If I want to be a good actor, I can’t have my guard up. If I want to be a good photographer I have to use the power of my camera to witness all aspects of our environment. There are times when it seems impossible to make sense of a situation: how parents could leave her own children, or why children are allowed to live in the streets without education or love. As an actor, as a photographer, as a member of my community, I try to live in the question, because then I am in the moment. Then my eyes are open to the different worlds my fellow human beings inhabit.

For This I Believe, I’m Megan Follows in Toronto.