I didn't know how to show my self love, and I didn't want anyone else to hurt me. So my tough girl attitude was like, 'I'm not having it.'
Being teased and losing my self value eventually ended up inspiring me to be a better version of myself.
'Rust' really started with the passing of my dad, and me really looking back inward to my self about where I stand with all things on a faith/religious/spiritual level. And it's really put me on this interesting road and very educational, I might add, road back to understanding the role of faith in God and Christ in my life.
I've been the best in the world, and I believe my self worth, it's more important to me than my net worth.
But that's something that I like about scoring film: it makes me reach out of the parameters of my self, it requires me to do things musically that I wouldn't normally do left to my own devices.
I've forgotten what it's like to remember. I've lost the mindless confidence that a moment, an idea, a thought will be there for me later, the bravado of breezing through experience in the certainty that it will become part of my self, part of my story.
When my disease nearly destroyed me in 2009, my doctors thought I'd be lucky to regain 80 percent of my cognitive abilities. When I was at my sickest, I couldn't read or write. I could barely walk on my own or groom myself. The disease felled me physically and mentally - robbing me, briefly but intensely, of my wits, my sanity, my memory, my self.
It wasn't until I stood in my truth and told everybody that I had $250,000 in credit card debt. At that point, everything turned around for me. I had to reveal the truth about what I didn't have, more than pretend about what I did. That was interesting.
It was the desire to see black girls and our experiences in the books that I was given to read at school that forced me to speak my truth. I launched #1000BlackGirlBooks, a book drive to collect the stories of women of color.
Using my voice has empowered me to take complete ownership of my life. So, in return for speaking my truth, I listen.
This is my truth, tell me yours.
Adults who loved and knew me, on many occasions sat me down and told me that I was black. As you could imagine, this had a profound impact on me and soon became my truth. Every friend I had was black; my girlfriends were black. I was seen as black, treated as black, and endured constant overt racism as a young black teenager.
For so much of my life, I lived feeling as if, if I spoke, if I said something, I would lose everything. I would be pushed out. No one will want me. No one will love me. No one would want to be friends with me. It took me decades to get to a space of saying, 'This is my truth. This is who I am, and I don't care if you like me or you don't like me.'
God has given me this gift to get out there and share my music and share my experiences and share my testimony. Why not be open? Why not be real? Why not walk in my truth?
In terms of stage presence for me, I'm influenced by a myriad of things. A lot of punk performers, people like Dave Vanian from The Damned and Davey Havok from AFI was a huge influence on me when I was younger.
I was kind of a MySpace kid in high school, and people thought since I had so many MySpace friends that they didn't need to be nice to me in real life. They were like, 'You get enough attention online,' or they were jealous or something. I don't really know.
A friend of mine told me a bunch of stuff on Buddhism and about Avicii being the lowest level of Buddhist hell, and it just sort of got stuck in my head. Later on when I went to setup a MySpace, I tried a bunch of names and they were all taken so I just kind of ended up with Avicii and then I got really attached to it.
I was on Facebook. I was on MySpace. And somebody said to me, You should check out this thing called Twitter. I knew five people that were on it, so I started following those people and seeing what they were doing, and then I applied my own sensibility to it. The more that I shared, the more people started following me.
I love MySpace; it's done an amazing job for me and it's been insane over the past couple of weeks, but I'm not a poster girl for them.
To me, 'rock star' conjures up something like a mystic: someone who sees himself as above other people, someone who has the key to the secret that people want to know.
