Look, you do everything in stages, right? I don't think everything happens at once. There are so many layers we are constantly chipping away at, down and down and down, closer and closer to what would be the body. I think what happened with cancer, was that I woke up out of nine hours of surgery and I was body. I was just body.

Anorexia was my attempt to have control over my body and manipulate my body and starve my body and shape my body. It was not a very good relationship. It was the sort of relationship my father had to my body. It was a tyrannical, "you'll do what I tell you" relationship.

I want to read so I can read the Koran read the signs in the street know the number of the bus I'm supposed to take when I one day leave this house.

I believe in irony. And if V-Day has taught me anything, it's that if you go out with artistic, outrageous irony and humor, people are drawn to it.

Dance has a transformative effect on bodily trauma.

We get off track. Capitalism takes us off track. You get off the "real" and get on the "wheel." The "wheel" becomes the winning and losing, the succeeding and failing, the "I will achieve." All that stuff becomes so preoccupying, particularly if you're born with low self-esteem, or no sense of yourself, or even if you're just born in the consumer culture. It's very powerful.

I have been struggling to find my way back into my body my whole life.