I have as much rage as you have, I have as much pain as you do, I’ve lived as much hell as you have, and I’ve kept mine bubbling under for you.
When we think of digitally disconnecting and inviting presence into our lives, we are creating the conditions of integration within and between.
Who I am inside determines how I feel about my body instead of the other way around.
I think God is in us. I think we manifest God in every moment.
I’m really clear about what my life mission is now. There’s no more depression or lethargy, and I feel like I’ve returned to the athlete I once was. I’m integrating all the parts of me – jock, musician, writer, poet, philosopher – and becoming stronger as a result.
At some point, I would like to write a book and other things, but I work best when there is some sort of deadline in my own mind, but not when fifty people or fifty million people are breathing down the back of my neck.
I saw music as a way to entertain people and take them away from their daily lives and put smiles on their faces, as opposed to what I see it being now, which is a way for me to actually communicate, and a way for me to tap into my subconscious.
I think it’s child abuse to have someone in the public eye too young. Society basically values wealth and fame and power at the cost of well-being. In the case of a child, it’s at the cost of someone’s natural development. It’s already hard enough to develop.
I was always such a people-watcher. I would sit on street corners alone and watch people and make up stories about them in my head. Then, all of a sudden, I was the one being watched.
To me the biggest irony of this lifetime that I’m living is that for someone who thrives in the public eye in the creative ways that I do, I actually don’t enjoy being in the public eye.
When someone says that I’m angry it’s actually a compliment. I have not always been direct with my anger in my relationships, which is part of why I’d write about it in my songs because I had such fear around expressing anger as a woman.
Ageism works in both directions. As a teenager in the public eye, people would talk condescendingly to me. When you get older there’s this feeling that you have to start carving up your face and body. Right now I’m in the middle ground – I think women in their thirties are taken seriously.
But I love to entertain. My vocation is to accrue all these experiences, to write about them, to get them out of my system, to not get sick, and then to share them publicly.
But once I acclimated and really used fame for what it was offering me as a tool to serve my life purpose of inspiring and contributing, then it started to get fun again.
I need to be performing. I need to be acting. I need to be designing a condo and ripping down walls and buying new plates and looking at fashion magazines. There always has to be some movement in the artistic department for me to not get really, really low.
I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression, whether it was through music, or acting, or dancing, or painting, or writing.
I was motivated by just thinking that if you had all this external success that everyone would love you and everything would be peaceful and wonderful.
I think it’s irresponsible when celebrities imply they’re doing it all themselves. My son has aunties and uncles around all the time, and my husband is my hero. He’s really full-on. I couldn’t do it any other way.
I have a profound empathy for people who are in the public eye, whether they manifest it themselves or whether it happened by accident – it doesn’t matter to me. I think there’s a great misunderstanding of what it is to be famous.
When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.