The early part of my career was the 1990s, and I was living in New York working as an actor. It was the world I was in. A lot of companies had a great deal of money.

I never made the choice to be an actor. It just sort of happened to me when I was a kid, for whatever reasons that are irrelevant in this moment.

I got into cooking and I went and cooked in Italy. I became a doula for a while. I built stone walls one summer, and I read a lot, and I swam a lot, and I spent a lot of time thinking.

That's something that rationally and logically I can't try to figure out, how somebody "transitions" so rapidly and so drastically, but I don't worry about it now.

Going into my 20s, I was uncertain, trying to figure out what my relationship to acting is.

I got to college in '99, and I went to study literature and writing, and so within a couple years we had Bush elected, 9/11, we were at war, so I was sort of having my political and spiritual awakening at the same time I was becoming an adult, and that's a lot of stuff at once. I became very focused on the state of the world, and I started studying that stuff more, and I just had a real identity crisis. I couldn't even really just study literature.

I did act as a kid, but I quit when I was seventeen.