Knowledge is good for life. Life is what you play off for acting.

One of the saints in my life is this woman named Imogene Hill, who was a fourth-grade teacher who taught this advanced class. She got hip to my whole situation in about a month and kindled a passion in me for learning things. I learned more that year than I think I learned in any year in school.

I’m curious. Period. I find everything interesting. Real life. Fake life. Objects. Flowers. Cats. But mostly people. If you keep your eyes open and your mind open, everything can be interesting. The secret is that there is no secret.

My answer may have surprised some in attendance at the meeting: I don’t have a role model or sensei. Or to be more precise, I don’t have a single teacher. Instead, I take it upon myself to learn from everyone around me. If we open our eyes, we may find that everyone can be our teacher.

Without that structure, I ended up feeling overwhelmed.

I do know that women are going to fight for equal rights, equal pay, equal treatment, equal respect…At the end of the day that is what all the women on the women’s national team deserve and we need to keep moving in that direction as a country in all the industries and obviously as a world.

I stayed on the path out of fear, not of being eaten by a wolf, but of being cut, being benched, losing my paycheck. If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing it would be this: "Abby, you were never Little Red Riding Hood; you were always the wolf."

I mean—I am biased—but my wife, Glennon Doyle. She teaches me every day. She teaches me about my own internalized sexism.

Too often women are told not to be ambitious. Girls are told not to be ambitious, to just fit in, don’t rock the boat, be happy and grateful for what you already have. And it’s like—no, the only way things change is if we start demanding what we deserve.

When you are in love, it's a knowing. It's a knowing like you know your own age, and you know your own family's, like, last name. That's what love feels like.