All of a sudden one day I was like, I'm good at this! Oh, man! People are not giving me jobs because they feel sorry for me! I am an actress. I am a singer. I am a performer. That's what I do! Once I started giving myself a little credit, the whole world opened up.

But from the time I was very little, it was something I would do all the time, just sing, dance and act. So it wasn't something that was fake or contrived as I got older.

But the idea of taking things and mixing them together is what I do in my music. I take hip-hop, R&B, pop, dance, funk and soul and mix it all together to get my own sound.

I think some people just use pregnancy as an excuse to really pig out. To be really disgusting. I am just going to eat this is my opportunity. I waited for this my whole life. I was not one of these people.

I love a good lyricist - always have. The thing that inspired me most was the different performers, like Tina Turner, James Brown, Michael Jackson, Madonna, even Janet Jackson.

It's not that I didn't love myself before. Sometimes we don't realize that we are compromising ourselves. To understand that a person is not good for you, or that that person is not treating you in the right way, or that he is not doing the right thing for himself - if I stay, then I am not doing the right thing for me. I love myself enough to walk away from that now.

Once you have a lot of success, you become a target in many ways.