I just got tired of being sick and tired and feeling down. Unfortunately, you don't realize this until you're getting sober but the reason why you're depressed all the time is it's the drugs that are depressing you.
All I know is that when you look over at the coaches on the other sideline, and all you see are guys who either coached with you or played for you, then you know it's time to get out.
I think there comes a time with a quarterback, especially when things go a little sideways, that players begin to try to do things a little uncharacteristic of what they've done in the past.
Most of the time it's the parents who recognise me. They try to tell their kids, 'Look, it's Giselle,' and I say, 'No, no, no, don't ruin this for them,' because I'm usually standing there with my hair sideways and no make-up on. And the kid is saying, 'That is not Giselle. No way. That is some worn-out girl who really needs a bath.'
Much of the time in the writer's room is spent working on story, and I was always challenging myself to make it more interesting, tighter and more surprising: to come at it sideways in a way that the audience wasn't expecting.
I received so many hate letters when I breast-fed a starving baby in Africa. I was in Sierra Leone in 2009 and I was weaning my child at that time - she was not there with me. There was a hungry baby who was crying because his mother had no milk, and I thought, 'Why throw away my milk if I can give it to a baby who needs it?'
I was born and raised in Liberia in West Africa. My mother is Sierra Leonean, and my father's Liberian. I grew up at a time when there was a lot of civil unrest in both countries, so when something would happen in Liberia, we'd go to Sierra Leone, and when something would happen in Sierra Leone, we'd go back to Liberia. We moved to save our lives.
I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to go to college in the United States. By the time I graduated, we had a full-blown civil war in both Liberia and Sierra Leone. I couldn't go home.
And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?
I go back to things all the time. It's really nice, too, like when I'm going through some kind of a writer's block, and I'm feeling uninspired, I go to some of my oldest songs from over the years and sift through them, and one thing that's very nice is to see how I've grown up a little bit. A little bit.
Laws are silent in time of war.
As an artist, as I design and lay out a page, the less-important things, things I want you to spend less time looking at, I draw them very small, maybe even silhouette them. The more-important pivotal scenes, I draw them larger, maybe even a double-page spread.
I am almost always, when I'm at home in the evening after work, in a silk bathrobe I got from India. Like, I never take off this bathrobe. I have a series of Indian silk bathrobes that I love, and that's what I rock all the time.
At home, I'm the silliest cornball who talks way too much and wants to be quiet and left alone at the same time.
I come up with the silliest excuses when it's time to work out. I'll be like, 'Oh no! Now I have to go and find some socks.'
Often people write stories about people who are suffering, and they're miserable all the time. That's not the case. You go to the food bank or wherever and there's laughter, there's comedy, there's stupidity, there's silliness and warmth. And that's the reality of people's lives. If you cut out that sense of humor and warmth, you miss the point.
Thereβs no such thing as working too hard. Donβt throw in the towel. Keep trying. But always make time for playfulness and silliness and joy in every day.
Every time I do something silly, it comes off really funny because it's natural.
I never wanted to make a graphic novel. As soon as you become a 'writer,' you have to be intelligent all the time... I like the fact that I have the right once in a while to say silly things.
There is no disgrace in working. There was no silver spoon around at the time I was born.
