JANET MOCK

If we want to enlighten people or give them new thoughts and ideas, we have to be willing to do the work of educating them.

When I was younger, I wish I would have been told more often that I was right and nothing was wrong with me, that I was deserving of everything this world has to offer, and that my visions for my future were worthy of pursuit.

When I feel that burden of representation in public spaces, it helps to recognize that it's a duty - a job, really. As with any job that you want to do well, you have to ensure that first and foremost you are energized and in the right head space to take on that task.

I don't chase beauty trends.

Toughening up, performing masculinity, pretending to enjoy things I didn't enjoy all enabled me to dodge the gender policing of the adults around me. But the way I really was - the swished hips, the Double-Dutching, the hair flips - seemed to always prevail and attract Dad's disdain.

Throughout the day, I like to spritz my face with a rose water for extra moisture.

I don't feel as if I'm typecast - like any writer, the difficulty is that one facet of my identity becomes louder, obscuring the fact that I'm also a woman, a writer, a lover of pop culture and other things.

We are all inundated with images that present a limited scope of what is considered beautiful. For American women, the closer she is to whiteness/paleness, cisness, thinness, and femininity, the more she is considered beautiful.

I wrote 'Redefining Realness' because not enough of our stories are being told, and I believe we need stories that reflect us so we don't feel so isolated in our apparent 'difference.'

I get invited to a lot of college campuses, and administrators think it's going to be a lecture on 'trans-ness' or whatever. But when young people get there, their questions are about just life.

Popular culture is most powerful when it offers us a vision of how our society should look - or at least reproduces our reality.

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.

To say that I loved school would be an understatement. It was my oasis, my sanctuary.

Throughout elementary and middle school, I was used to hearing other words: Smart. Studious. Well-spoken. Well-read. They became pillars of my self-confidence, enabling me to build myself up on what I contributed rather than what I looked like.

Movies have always been spaces of refuge for me. For a few harmonious hours, I could escape my reality of being a girl living on the margins.

There's nothing more mundane than sitting across from a celebrity in a sterile gray conference room. But when the star sitting across from you is Taraji Penda Henson, you are being treated to a master class in the art of the hustle.

I was six years old when 'The Little Mermaid' was released in 1989 and was immediately struck by the fiery-maned, melodic-voiced, tail-swinging mermaid protagonist. She spoke to me on levels deeper than her father's oceanic kingdom.

When I was a high school freshman in Honolulu, I would sit with my girlfriends on the bleachers of the school amphitheater every morning. We'd meet in the same spot and chat for an hour before homeroom began.

A staple in my makeup bag is Black Opal's True Color Skin Perfecting Stick Foundation, which offers a range of colors with many undertones.

We must have the audacity to turn up the frequency of our truths.

The Internet has introduced me to some of my closest friends.

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.

I came out, as not enough of our stories are told from our perspective. 'Marie Claire' was offering the chance to be a part of a women's magazine, which often celebrates ordinary women doing extraordinary things.

We cannot and should not be reduced to just one sliver of ourselves, as it skews the truth of our lived experiences.

We are multiplicities, and none of us live single-identity lives.