Like many teens, I struggled with my body and looks, but my despair was amplified by the expectations of cisnormativity and the gender binary as well as the impossibly high beauty standards that I, and my female peers, measured myself against.

There's power in naming yourself, in proclaiming to the world that this is who you are. Wielding this power is often a difficult step for many transgender people because it's also a very visible one.

When marginalized people gain voice and center their own experiences, things begin changing. And we see this in all kinds of grassroots movements.

The universe wants us to have fun doing more than one thing in life. That's how it learns. You don't have one purpose in life. You have maybe 500 or so.

If you spend a lot of energy on things that are wastes of time, then you waste energy, get sick, and die faster.

Every tomorrow is determined by every today.

Nobody is more worthy of love in the entire universe than you. I wish I had reminded myself of that more.

Life is better when your sinuses are clean, when your arteries are clean, and when your digestive tract is clean.

You can say no to people who make you feel bad about yourself. To people who backstab you or make you feel anxious in any way.

People unconsciously know when you are not listening to them. Then they say 'No' to you.

I always imagine a good leader is surrounded by people who call their mothers at the end of the day and tell them, 'Mom, you can't believe what I did today. Let me tell you about it.'

Being a leader doesn't mean you created something or you did something great in the past or some other person has given you any kind of authority.

Being a leader doesn't mean you are the guy who runs things.

Buying coffee on the street instead of in a Starbucks is the poor man's way to get rich. In other words, you will never get rich by scratching out ten cents from your dollar.

When I was 22, I was thrown out of graduate school and then fired from three jobs in a row at higher and higher salaries where I saved nothing.

Help is a conversation. If one side talks too much, the other side will get bored. So make sure you help back when you can.

A lot of times, people send me emails, and then I forget about them, or I never respond to them, or I respond to them weeks later.

Read every sentence you write out loud. If it sounds boring, kill it.

It's hard to know which stars in the sky will turn into black holes. And which ones will open up worm holes into entire new universes.

I keep track of my blog stats, Facebook subs, my Amazon rank, Twitter followers, Facebook likes per posts, my chess ranking. I get stressed when they all don't go up.

America is a country of fighters. People who fought their way in and then continued fighting.

My grandfather was an illegal immigrant for the 60 or so years he was in the United States. I had another great-great-grandmother on my mom's side who snuck in in a suitcase.

I can tell you this: Everything in my life that I am happy about it is the product of a huge mistake.

Mistakes I've made in the past make me afraid to try new things in the future. I want to be perfect.