I, too, suffered the indignity of having a younger sibling, my sister Nell, so I turned to the adult who seemed to understand my feelings so clearly.
"People try to spare my feelings, so I didn't know she had turned down several opportunities to have meetings with me," Lewinsky told me in a brief, careful telephone interview.
"It hurt my feelings so I figured, I've got to get out of this.
If you say something that hurts my feelings, so be it.
But basically, I draw by my feelings, so I do not only draw happy things.
I often had to disconnect from my feelings so I could stay present to the situation at hand, which could be so heightened and alarming that my natural instinct would have been to run.
I spent the next 24 hours on planes and in airports with a lot of time to sort out my feelings so by the time I arrived in Shenzhen, I was in a good place.
Here is a brief excerpt from my book Dirty Daddy, which addresses my childhood name-calling discomfort with being called "Saget the faggot" -- "When guys called me that it hurt my feelings so much that to get back at them, I would blow them.
This is, of course, a mental health issue, but one that is not helped by everything from my housing situation to my career feeling so unstable.
JJ: Maybe because I spent my 20s feeling so excluded, I find the word "feminist" difficult to apply to myself.
