The way your parents try to talk to you about politics and pull you to their side, that's an exciting moment in your family.

The truth is even though we sort of feel like we have equal rights in America, right under the surface we have huge issues at play that really do affect women. It's time for all the women in America and all the women that love women and all the gay people and the people of color that we've all fought for to fight for us now.

What I did find out because I grew up with a lot of chaos early on: sometimes, you're born into a family, and their norm is already in your red zone of dangerous feeling or feeling too chaotic. You don't get to really do anything about that when you're a kid.

I know when we were really little, my mom would say to me, "If you can, the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning, just get quiet and ask God, 'Who is Patricia?' You can feel your own nature and know who you are."

We have Latinas in California making 55 cents on the dollar. Black women making 63 cents on the dollar. White women making 78 cents on the dollar. It doesn't change very much year by year, it might go up or down a penny, but oftentimes, the years that it goes up are the same years that men are making a little bit more. It's pretty much always in proportion.

Hippy people had a hopeful idea of what they wanted the world to be like, then most of them changed into corporate Yuppies. But I still have that hippy thing underneath somewhere.

I was raised by somebody with the perception of trying to allow me the space and show me the importance of knowing who I was and figuring out who I was and appreciating who I was.