WATCH: Nkechi Okoro Carroll at Black Women in Hollywood

Writer Nkechi Okoro Carroll shares about her childhood and her love for television at 2024 Black Women in Hollywood event.

Transcript

00:00 One of my aunts, and I have like 9,000,

00:02 my mom has a lot of sisters, a lot of best friends,

00:04 people always snatch me up in the street.

00:05 I got a lot of aunts.

00:07 But when I told one of them about this award,

00:09 she was so excited and she said, "Not bad for the little kid

00:14 with the heart problems who loved TV."

00:17 And until she said that, I'd actually forgotten

00:20 that for a large part of my childhood, I used to walk

00:22 around with one of those -- I'm about to really age myself.

00:26 It was one of those -- it looked like a Walkman,

00:28 and it had little prongs that attached to my heart

00:30 and would send signals to my doctor's office.

00:33 And I used to get palpitations all the time.

00:35 They didn't know why.

00:36 And so I used to walk around with this thing.

00:38 I would sit down and I would watch an obscene amount

00:41 of television, US TV, UK TV.

00:44 I was living in the Cote d'Ivoire at the time, so Ivorian TV.

00:48 And I just sat there, let the readings go out to my doctor.

00:54 And when she said that, it reminded me just how far I came

01:00 with the dreams I had.

01:01 So I want to take a moment to thank that little girl

01:05 with the heart problems who sat in Cote d'Ivoire

01:07 and dreamed the seemingly impossible dream.

01:10 [ Music ]