I had pretty much accepted the fact I was going to be a stay-at-home mom and do my other adventures in life. I thought coming back to the WWE was out of the cards for me.
There are individuals out there who use the body protection as a form of staying power to go on as long as possible. That's the worst way anybody can be thinking, that you should cover yourself in a suit of armour, to make yourself brave, or to enable you to hook - when you never hooked in your life - just because you've got a helmet on.
A game one of my sisters will play with me in my first year of being alive is called Good Baby, Bad Baby. This consists of being told I am a good baby until I smile and laugh, then being told I am a bad baby until I burst into tears. This training will stand me in good stead all through my life.
The army taught me to sign my name very quickly, and that's stood me in good stead the rest of my life.
Above our life we love a steadfast friend.
We will not attain a state of perfection in this life, but we can and should press forward with faith in Christ along the strait and narrow path and make steady progress toward our eternal destiny.
If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
I went through life like an idiot for a great deal of the time, saying there's nothing I would change. That was a very arrogant thing to say. There's a lot I would change. There are people I would have steered clear of.
I can hardly find the words to describe the peace I felt when I was acting. My dysfunctional self could actually plug in to another self, not my own, and it felt so good. It was the first time that I existed inside a fully-functioning self - one that I controlled, that I steered, that I gave life to.
My values stemmed from the family. Anything I have achieved in life has been rooted in my upbringing.
I draw inspiration from my life, and, honestly, a lot of my religious beliefs have stemmed into my music.
I grew up without a father, who was kept a mystery to me. There was a sense of uprootedness, things being one day here and the next day not; a sense anything could happen. Then, all of a sudden, my mother met my stepfather, and her life became happier, and my life changed, my name changed.
I kind of grew up with a mix of two things. One was kind of this individual work ethic that my father and my stepfather and my mother all taught me, which was never depend on anyone else to do things for you, and work really hard on your own. At the same time, I benefited from the help of church and family and government my whole life.
No, I wasn't really suing my mother. I was just trying to get in control of my finances and my life. My stepfather has only wanted me around for my money, and he threatened to leave my mother if he didn't get the money anymore.
I did go on safari in Kenya when I was 17, with my mother, stepfather and little brother, and I kept a careful journal of the experience that was very helpful in terms of my sensory impressions of Africa. I have traveled quite a bit at distinct times in my life, though now that I have kids I've settled down.
My mother's a psychologist, my stepfather's a psychologist, my stepmother is a therapist and my dad's a lawyer. So it was all prominent in my life. I don't know anyone who doesn't know someone on some form of prescription medicine.
After the success of 'August,' there were people saying I should change my life. And maybe I should have bought a yacht and traveled the world instead of returning to Steppenwolf to act in and write plays. But I'm from the Midwest, and that's what we do: We go back to work.
Steppenwolf has always been at the center of everything in my professional life.
Here's something I probably shouldn't be saying: I never listen to my soundtrack albums because I can't stand it. It's just stereo. When I write, I write in surround. My life is in surround.
This is not the first time in my life where you know going into a job that you're going to hear in stereo what was wrong with what you did.