I continued for too long to do things that I already knew how to do, or to write stories that I was assigned instead of fighting for stories that I couldn't get, or doing ones that I thought were important on my own. The wasting of time is the thing I worry about the most. Because time is all there is.

In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.

It turns out that we literally don't empathize unless we're physically present - that the oxytocin, the famous "tend and befriend" hormone is not produced unless we're present with all five senses.

Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

I hope readers will consider, especially in this age of the World Wide Web, that as miraculous as it is, we still need to be in the same room with all five senses if we are to empathize with each other.

As an activist, you do find yourself directed more toward public action. But I've always tried to use stories from my own life in my writing for instance. It has always been clear to me that the stories of each other's lives are our best textbooks. Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences. So, if we've shared many experiences, then it probably has something to do with power or politics, and if we unify and act together, then we can make a change.

When gender comes down upon us, male or female, it comes as a restriction.