I don't remember what they said, only the fury of their words, how the air turned raw and full of welts. Later it would remind me of birds trapped inside a closed room, flinging themselves against the windows and the walls, against each other.

I believe in the goodness of imagination.

I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.

It was the first time I'd ever said the words to another person, and the sound of them broke open my heart.

As an adolescent, I went to charm school, where I learned to pour tea and relate to boys, which, as I recall, meant giving them the pickle jar to unscrew, whether it was too hard for me or not.

I found that I could not climb my way up to God in a blaze of doing and performing. Rather, I had to descend into the depths of myself and find God there in the darkness of troubled waters.

The True Self is not our creation, but God's. It is the self we are in our depths. It is our capacity for divinity and transcendence.