When it comes to age, I just feel like puberty is, like, the most horrible time of anyone's life.
I started puberty very late. I was nearly sixteen. And for complicated reasons this late arrival of my puberty caused me to stop playing competitive tennis. But before my puberty problem, I had trouble with my lower back and with my left testicle.
Midlife is a time of explosive change, particularly for women. It's just like experiencing another puberty. The changes that take place in your body are enormous and, like puberty, you have to throw off the past.
Puberty extends into your twenties, for sure, and some people don't get over that until much later in life. I feel like I'm just starting to get over puberty - basically twenty years of insufferable, totally self-obsessed hell.
In your teens, you get the physical puberty, and between 28 and 32, mental puberty. It does make you feel differently.
Most of what I've written songs about are things that come out of the confusing emotional, spiritual and psychological period of time when you're going through puberty.
But puberty was... well, before puberty, at school, I didn't tell kids I was a transvestite 'cause I thought they might kill me with sticks, you know?
Most of your life after puberty, you're either seeking to reproduce or living with the consequences of having done so. At 70, you start going back to being 11 again.
I had been on puberty suppressants and hormone suppressants, so I did not go through male puberty.
In the real world, there's probably nothing more horrifying than racism. Living racism is a horrifying experience. And then, having to normalize it and internalize it.
Most observers of the French Revolution, especially the clever and noble ones, have explained it as a life-threatening and contagious illness. They have remained standing with the symptoms and have interpreted these in manifold and contrary ways. Some have regarded it as a merely local ill. The most ingenious opponents have pressed for castration. They well noticed that this alleged illness is nothing other than the crisis of beginning puberty.
To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying
Puberty was definitely difficult for me. I remember my friends and I looking forward to puberty because it seemed exciting at first. You read Judy Blume and you think, "This is kind of cool." But when it actually started happening to me, I was terrified.
Harassment is one of puberty's darkest, most unreported rites of passage.
I had been afraid of breast cancer, as I suspect most women are, from the time I hit adolescence. At that age, when our emerging sexuality is our central preoccupation, the idea of disfigurement of a breast is particularly horrifying.
I started going to Bible school really early in life. Being raised a Jehovah's Witness, I had to read the Bible over and over. These stories were so horrifying and really difficult to reconcile. For me, Noah wasn't the story of the graham cracker box with the little animals it was horrifying. I would ask the same questions as a child. "Well, what about the little kids? What about the dogs and cats?"