He said, You're so tiny, like a doll, you look like you might break. I wanted him to break me. Part of me did.

He said that black sheeps express everyone else's anger and pain. It's not that they have all the anger and pain-they're just the only ones who let it out. Then the other people don't have to.

It's important to tell your story. It's important to listen.

Stories are like genies...They can carry us into and though our sorrows. Sometimes they burn, sometimes they dance, sometimes they weep, sometimes they sing. Like genies, everyone has one. Like genies, sometimes we forget that we do. Our stories can set us free...When we set them free.

My mother says that pain is hidden in everyone you see. She says try to imagine it like big bunches of flowers that everyone is carrying around with them. Think of your pain like a big bunch of red roses, a beautiful thorn necklace. Everyone has one.

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model with collagen-puffed lips and silicone-inflated breasts, a woman in a magenta convertible with heart-shaped sunglasses and cotton candy hair; if Los Angeles is this woman, then the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister. The teenybopper sister snaps bug stretchy pink bubbles over her tongue and checks her lipgloss in the rearview mirror, . . . Teeny plays the radio too loud and bites her nails, wondering if the glitter polish will poison her.

I think depression creates in me an urgent need to write, but I also believe that daily stress, and even the positive stress of intense happiness, can compel me to express myself through the written word.