I grew up with a lot of spirituality. It wasn't necessarily organized religion, because my mom was Jewish and my dad was Muslim. I went to Catholic school. There was a lot of conversation about comparative religions.

As a teenager, you have so much energy and hormones and you feel powerless in your life.

We all have our own little thing, I think.

The average woman loses a half million dollars over a lifetime, but women with higher degrees lose $2 million over a lifetime.

The number-one reason women say they returned to their abuser is financial insecurity. Often they have kids with them. They say half of the 66 million women and kids living in poverty in the US wouldn't be if women were just paid their full dollar. That's an enormous impact we could make on child hunger.

There are so many issues that impact women. When we talk about prison reform, for example, women were [once] sterilized in women's prisons. When they were giving birth, they were asked to sign paperwork but they weren't even completely conscious of what they were signing. That sounds like something that would never happen in America, but it was happening, not just in America, but in [California], one of the most progressive states in the United States.

There are a lot of parts of who I am that no one in the public has ever known, but the older I've gotten, the more I've appreciated my own strange little self and come to terms with that.