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I'd never want to go back to being in my twenties or thirties. I was lost and confused and uncomfortable in my own skin.

I spent the first fourteen years of my life convinced that my looks were hideous. Adolescence is painful for everyone, I know, but mine was plain weird.

I lost my mind at 15. I'd been shown a world where there were no boundaries, where everyone gave me all the power. And I was like, 'This is great!' Then that was gone. But I was like, 'Yeah, but I still want that.' I'd lost my humble, very quiet, introverted sensibilities which I think I definitely had as a kid.

I'm learning to accept everything that I am. I've accepted that I'm not going to be a stick-thin-model kind of girl. When I was 14, I was tall and spindly. By the time I turned 18, I had become a woman, and my body's not going to go back to what it looked like when I was 14.

In fact, you couldn't give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.

I was kind of an unhappy kid. I always felt like a cynical New Yorker trapped in a little kid's body. I started to get some pretty bad anxiety disorders around puberty, which totally did not work with growing up a mile away from the beach. I started cutting my own hair.

When I was 14, I thought I looked terrible. I wore these typical Slavic shoes with metal bottoms so you could always hear me coming and this really ugly princess skirt and blouse with the top button closed. I had a boy haircut, a baby face covered with pimples, and a really big nose.

I don't want to return to the past. I don't yearn for when I was 18 years old. I was in high school then. I had acne. I had a terrible hairdo. I'm sure I was sporting polyester pants.

When I was younger, I was afraid to be myself.