Adults tell students that it gets better, that the world changes after school, that being 'different' will pay off sometime after graduation. But no one explains to them why.
I never thought I'd play soccer past high school, so to go from that team to actually being most-capped and three World Cups is pretty special.
I did have pushback in the beginning of my career because my parents weren't really sure what I was going to do with my life going in the route of makeup. I was planning on medical school, so when I threw the makeup wrench at them, they were not expecting that.
My brother was going to go to England to wrestle, but then we found out they were opening a wrestling school in Bray, County Wicklow. I thought, 'I'll go along and try that.'
I am a Yale Law School graduate.
I was planning on going to Yale to theater school.
I grew up around politics. I organized my first campaign when I was 14, a walk-out in my high school to protest the year-round school schedule.
With families, your priorities shift. You're not going to be like, 'Let's go out on tour year-round.' I have kids in school. You have to lay things out.
I definitely wasn't cool in high school. I really wasn't. I did belong to many of the clubs and was in leadership on yearbook and did the musical theater route, so I had friends in all areas. But I certainly did not know what to wear, did not know how to do my hair, all those things.
If I was in love with someone, I would get their picture out of the school yearbook and do portraits. If I was curious about sex, I would draw pictures of it. There were no books for me to look at. Then I would go find my father's matches to burn the paper.
When I think of high school, stills are so important: it's all about the wallet with the kids - they define themselves with pictures, who they know, whose pictures they have. Yearbook pictures.
I was voted funniest person in my middle-school yearbook. So I guess I was funny in middle school?
I was named Class Clown in the high school yearbook, so I was always turning to comedy and laughter to heal and to get me through things.
I went to James Monroe High School, a big school in the East Bronx. My first promotion was the first alumni reunion dance. I got all the names and addresses out of the yearbook. It came off very well.
When I was a young man in school, I used to read science fiction and really liked it. And as I became a young artist, I was filling up my portfolio with alien planets and spacecraft and things like that.
I didn't think at all as a young child that music would be my profession. It was just something that one did along with going to Brownies or going to church or going to school or anything else that one did in sort of one's very young life.
'Beyond the Lights' was my fourth film. I gained a lot of knowledge, and I'm excited to share that with young filmmakers because I know how lost I was coming out of film school with that question of 'What's next?'
I definitely think being a young girl, there's a time where - like when you're in middle school or when you first start liking boys - you don't really feel comfortable. You remember that time when you first got your period, or when your boobs started coming in, that you were like, 'This is weird.' You have to grow into yourself.
Music education was always big for me. Ever since I was a young kid, I always said it was the reason I went to school sometimes and knowing if I didn't do well in class that my mom wasn't gonna let me sing in school or sing at that concert.
I've played through a lot of injuries before, as a young kid through high school.
