Once you are diagnosed with cancer, time changes. It both speeds up insanely and stops altogether.

This artistic uprising we had the other night in Washington Square park: there was poetry, there was dance, there was song, there was spoken word; and people left feeling so inspired and so energised. We have to get ourselves out of this syndrome of trauma and being re-traumatised. Art releases this energy. It exposes us to wonder again, and magic again, and ambiguity - all the things we need to really keep going and fighting and resisting in these times.

Women are the primary resource of the planet. They give birth, we come from them. They are mothers, they are visionaries, they are the future. If we can figure out how to make women feel safe and honor women, it would be parallel or equal to honoring life itself.

People didn't feel so much shame around it and that they didn't feel so much humiliation around it. And the other thing that people have given me a lot of feedback about - something I'm very excited about - is all the stuff around chemo as an "empathetic warrior."

I think all my work's been about how do women get back into our bodies; how do men get back. We're all disassociated.

What happens when someone throws you against a wall or tells you you're a jackass or puts you down or calls you bad names? It goes into your body. We hold it in our body. If we don't have a way to let that go and release that, it becomes sickness eventually.

When you listen to other women’s stories, you begin to understand your own better, and you begin to find ways back through and with each other.