Self Discovery

You have to have insane confidence in yourself, even if it's not real. You need to be your own cheerleader now, because there isn't a room full of people waiting with pom-poms to tell you you did it.

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.

You can call me Arnold. You can call me Schwarzenegger. You can call me the Austrian Oak. You can call me Schwarzy. You can call me Arnie. But don't ever, ever call me the self-made man.

You will get nowhere without a spiritual practice. Not necessarily religion — maybe it's music, or dancing, or just time for yourself to feed and nurture your own spirit.

In some ways, you've always been a creature of chaos. The complications of Act II, which will tip all you have been before into chaos, have been set up and abetted by really clever foreshadowing in Act I, by all those slippery you's over the years.

The universe may seem like a lonely place sometimes, but there are as many you's as there are stars in the sky. Maybe one of them will step up at the right time and tell you what to make of it all.

Keep chasing those moments where you discover something new about your voice. Don't ever let that end.

You define your value. No one else.

Nobody knows what they're doing. Nobody does. Everyone's winging it out there. Some people are just better at pretending to be confident.

You are the only one who can create the life you want and you may have to break some rules to do that. You are the only one who can create a system that's going to work for you and that needs to start right now.

When big decisions pop up, get quiet, real quiet and listen. Turn off your phone, turn off your computer and listen to your true heart. Hear the thing that makes you feel sick with excitement and scares you because you know you will learn — and do that thing.

Looking back at my ambition to become a lawyer, it looks less like a plan for the future and more like an alibi for the present.