Instead of hating, I have chosen to forgive and spend all of my positive energy on changing the world.
One of my earliest memories is of my father carrying me in one arm with a picket sign in the other.
Parents know how to push your buttons because, hey, they sewed them on.
I don't even like to be naked in front of myself!
For a long time, I really struggled with the idea of being an actor because I really felt that I should be in the Peace Corps.
Waiting, waiting, waiting. All my life, I've been waiting for my life to begin, as if somehow my life was ahead of me, and that someday I would arrive at it.
I have lived my life in a culture that hates fat people.
Isn't it amazing how celebrity status preempts even the most ingrained hatreds?
I learned how to sign because when I was growing up in California in order to get into college you needed two semesters of language to get into a University of California school.
Both of my parents are professors and everyone in my family has some fabulous degree of something or another and I couldn't get into college because I didn't know a language.
I placed over a thousand deaf people in jobs throughout my career working for the deaf.
One of the things I did when I was in New York, which has a wonderful deaf community, is I have worked on making Broadway more accessible to deaf people.
It never occurred to me that I'd be on a television show or in feature films but when those came into play my dreams changed along the way.
Years ago women of my size were considered royalty.
Nobody else knew what to do with me because big women are old.
I was scared, because I knew that in the political arena, you have to satisfy so many different types of people at once, and I wasn't sure that I could speak for everybody and be politically correct.
When I meet large women who walk with confidence and are articulate and really have an understanding of how they walk in this world, I love them so deeply for being able to overcome such unbelievable odds.
So instead of beating myself up for being fat, I think it's a miracle that I laugh every day and walk through my life with pride, because our culture is unrelenting when it comes to large people.
I've always thought of fat as just a descriptive word.
I hate overweight, because it implies that there's a weight standard I should be adhering to.
