When my best friends doubt their little black dresses, they call me on the telephone seeking reassurance.
Maybe it's because my mother divorced and my grandmother divorced, so maybe I'm frightened deep down. But then I also feel there is no real need. Why do I need to get married? To reassure me? No I don't need reassurance.
One of the things I've realised is that I am very simple. My wife asked me once if I loved her. I said: 'Look love, I'm a simple man. I love you. End of story.' But I guess you gotta keep saying it with women. I guess she needed reassurance.
I'm always feeling like I'm lacking wisdom. This reassurance that one can ask God for that and it will happen is certainly reassuring to me.
I used to pass by a large computer system with the feeling that it represented the summed-up knowledge of human beings. It reassured me to think of all those programs as a kind of library in which our understanding of the world was recorded in intricate and exquisite detail.
I have always had dense, cyst-prone breasts, so I didn't think much of it when my OB/GYN discovered a lump on a routine physical exam in August of 2006. 'It's a cyst,' she assured me, and I believed her. Several weeks after, I had a negative mammogram, which should have reassured me. Only something felt wrong about this particular lump.
It's reassuring knowing that people are supporting me and want to know more about me. It comes with being the national champion and making the Olympic team. I think that it's telling me I'm on the right path.
Other people will call me a rebel, but I just feel like I'm living my life and doing what I want to do. Sometimes people call that rebellion, especially when you're a woman.
Religion has stayed with me even though I rebelled.
My mom had struggles. My dad had struggles. He raised me as a single parent. I rebelled and almost quit amateur boxing, but my faith in God had a lot to do with me slowly getting my life together.
I signed schoolboy forms for Watford when I was 12, but then my parents got divorced, and I never kicked a ball for three years. I rebelled, I left home, but getting back into football sorted me out. It was the second chance I needed.
I guess I have sort of an atypical relationship with my mom for someone my age, because I think I started so young with the music thing and I had my parents always on the road with me. So at a time when I think I should have been rebelling, like in high school, they were actually my best friends.
I'm rebelling against being handed a career, like, 'You're the next this; you're the next that.' I'm not the next anything, I'm the first me. I can't be myself, I can't just be Idris Elba. But that's just the nature of the business.
The spiritual ambiguity growing up made me really latch onto a faith - Protestantism - that was somewhat conventional. Everyone else was rebelling against traditions and institutions, whereas I was rebelling against the upheaval and uncertainty in my family.
Change is growth. For me it has been a very spiritual and musical rebirth.
I've just been on a German TV show called 'Come Back', a bit like 'Reborn In The USA', and the pressure of being scrutinised all the time by cameras has made me very self-conscious.
I was kind of forced to rebound at a young age. I was usually at the back in the press of the 2-3 zone, because my brothers were smaller than me. So I usually got most of the rebounds.
The bottom line is, I want us to rebound, defend, share the ball, play hard. That's all. Now if you can't do that, if that's not important enough to you, it's not on me.
I consider my girls the greatest gift from God in life. And I also love the career that I have built, lost and rebuilt. But the highs and lows of my career would not have been as exciting or manageable to me if I didn't have children and a partner for life with whom to share it all.
A long, negative review I wrote of Rushdie's novel 'Fury' earned me a rebuke from the writer: He told an administrator at the college where I teach, and who had invited Rushdie to come speak, that he wouldn't share the stage with me.
