I see myself as a “permission machine.” In the beginning of his incredible essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson says: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.” The essay and in particular that phrase hit me hard in the solar plexus when I first heard it at eighteen years old, and it continues to today. The deepest truths about your experience are universal truths that connect each of us to each other, and to the world around us.
