Cancer came back into my life twice in order for me to understand something, and I guess I still wasn’t getting it. And my husband wasn’t getting it, either.
What they were giving me seemed incredibly real to me, so I’d react to it in a very real way. That was frightening for me, especially because of the subject.
What I wasn’t prepared for were the feelings of anxiety that it stirred in me. I wasn’t prepared for the initial feeling of I don’t want to have to do that again. I was scared.
The experience of getting my Kriya, which is the meditation process that I do, was very powerful for me – though, as I explain in the book, I was really suspect of that kind of thing.
Well, I was passionately curious about what my body was doing, and when I got the lessons on how to meditate, it seemed really solid to me. It seemed real.
The other thing is surrounding yourself with people that care for you. These are simple things, but they’re powerful, and they’ve completely transformed who I am and how I perceive myself.
I loved acting when I was doing it, but getting the jobs I didn’t understand because I’d never had to do it. That was a difficult lesson for me. It was very humbling and very bizarre.
I got back into the position of taking care of my husband, which is what I’d learned that I couldn’t really do: you can love and make things okay to a certain extent, but you can’t fix. I didn’t quite learn that until the kayaking incident. It became so clear then.
But the experience that I had, which was basically just feeling loved and taken care of in a room full of thousands of people I didn’t know, seemed to be a pretty strong sign that what I was doing was a good thing.
We’re taught to take care of people we love, but sometimes you can’t.
I was taken by the romanticism of being thought of as an adult and living in a world that was completely new to me. I fell in love with acting then.
If you’re an addict, if you drink and you’re putting a depressant into your body, it’s going to cause serious problems.
I think talent, especially in acting, is being wholly yourself within the context of yourself.
Maybe in any art you have to be wholly you in the context of whatever you’re doing.
There’s nothing beautiful about somebody killing themselves.
Those that have lost their lives to suicide were good people, who were in deep, deep pain. Keep speaking about mental illness and keep it out of the darkness.
A family is a cracked mirror that nevertheless reflects us accurately.
Being loud after drinking wine doesn’t help. Being silent after drinking wine doesn’t help. Nothing really ever gets solved either way.
Everyone needs to take control of his or her own life by making sense of it. It doesn’t matter how conventional or unconventional that process is.
Suicide is a permanent question.
I told her about how people in families felt left out sometimes, and how that could result in disappointment or sadness but also become something more volatile, a kind of uncontrolled fury.