Everybody was starting to grow long hair and wear pink suits and purple glasses and stuff and then, I suppose, some people thought we were crazy, but we weren't really crazy because we're all still here!
I had always thought of starting my own record company. I haven't regretted the decision - yet!
Starting out as young women, we didn't care that people thought that we were a fad or if people thought we didn't dress girly enough - we were just like, 'Whatever.' We were able to accomplish that with three totally different girls, in a group.
I never thought about branding when we were starting our production company.
It wasn't that we were afraid of the Church or the Vatican. The record company thought people might find the title offensive. They asked me if I would change ["A Deal with God"].
There was a long time in my life where I made music that I thought my friends would like, or that I thought would get me a record deal, or what I thought I was supposed to make because that's what I was seeing in mainstream. I didn't know myself; I didn't find myself musically or, in real life.
Microsoft is a much bigger company than Qualcomm - a much bigger company - and there were a few days where I thought, 'I don't know if I can do this. It's huge.' My job was to come into the company and grow new businesses, and I thought, 'I'm not sure,' but it's all worked out pretty well.
I always kind of divided the gay guys I met up into two groups when I first started coming out. There were the guys who thought there was something fundamentally wrong with them and hated themselves and were so burdened with shame and internalized homophobia. It just really paralyzed and shredded them. And then there were guys like me who thought, "I'm fine, everybody else is crazy. My church is sick and the family's crazy, but me? I'm fine."
When you are doing music videos through the '90s, which I did, and the 2000s, you were put in the position, really, as an independent filmmaker. You were being financed by a major record company or a minor record company or whatever.
I was very ashamed of seeing a therapist because I thought only crazy people went, and then, after about nine years, I asked him, 'Well, was I really crazy?' And he nodded and said, 'You were but not any more.'
I stayed in the astronaut program until 1993. People ask me why I left. I thought I had a lot of things to contribute that would be difficult to do if I stayed. I thought I could have a stronger voice as an advocate for space exploration. So I ended up starting my own technology consulting company.
I realized I was more convincing to myself and to the people who were listening when I actually said what I thought, versus what I thought people wanted to hear me say.
I don't think I ever thought of myself as Superman. But there were people who thought of me that way, and maybe I believed them a little.
The Yardbirds sort of disbanded, and I was disappointed because I thought what we were doing was really good. I thought we were really onto something. I thought I was really onto something with these ideas that I had.
When I was 16, my friends and I were all starting to think about what we were going to do with our lives, and I started picturing myself majoring in dance at college traveling around with a contemporary dance company, and it didn't excite me as I thought it would all those years. I was just thinking about the things that I loved most about dance, which was entertaining and telling a story, and that's when I kind of opened my eyes again to acting.
Nobody supported me; my family thought I had gone crazy. They thought, you crazy gangster, you crazy drug addict, now you want to be a writer? That's it! They totally gave up on me after that.