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What made me empathic was my depressions.

I feel like I'm kind of a bit of a sponge in a way. Like, if people around me are going through things, I find it very hard not to be empathetic.

To be empathetic to everyone around you, I think, is such a powerful thing to hold.

It's been one of the most painful things I've ever been through in my whole life: trying to understand the degree to which behaviors that I thought were totally appropriate were destructive.

I used to have to think about awful things to get myself emotionally connected to something.

It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

During my teen years, I was real emotional. I could be really up or down.

I liked the fact that I was forced to get inside of my emotions and to really try to figure out a lot of what I was going through.

I was emotional. I wanted to be taken seriously. I was pretty emo. I was reciting Shakespeare monologues when I was 10. I still know the whole 'To be, or not to be...' monologue, because I knew it when I was 10.

When you have kids, for me, it really changed me. I was always empathetic to other children, but now I'm so much more sensitive to children that aren't my own.