I think as a culture, we don't like conflict or looking at icky stuff - especially in our downtime.

Since I loved underground music, I tried to carve a space for feminism within it. Those were my hopes.

My illness has changed me - I've always thought "life is short and I wanna make as much of it as I can," but I really don't have time to mess around. This has really been a wake-up call in terms of what's important, and I'm working hard to figure that out. I need to get better at not doing favors for people all the time. It's hard because there's so many people who have helped me get to the point where I'm in a band that people wanna come see, or where people pay money to see me lecture.

I am not Lyme disease, that's not who I am, I'm still a feminist artist, but this is a part of my story too, and I'm not going to keep it out to look cooler.

It's so crazy because kids that wrote to me when they were 14 years old are still in my life. A lot have gone on to become musicians and artists in their own right who inspire me now.

Me and my friends in high school were the only girls who went to hardcore shows. It was three of us, and the rest of the audience was male. We didn't really think about it. We weren't thinking we were alienated or whatever, but eventually, as there started to be violence in the scene we were in during high school, we started to be turned off by the violence.

My mom wasn't, like, she was reading all these historical romance novels the majority of the time. She read a feminist book and then my dad would sit down and explain it to her like she was an idiot.