I did not see myself particularly as a woman. I did not feel that I had any particular gender. But in a restaurant one day, where I sat with my foot in its sandal up on the edge of a chair, a stranger came over to talk to me and went back to his seat and then later, on his way out, passed me and leaned down to touch my bare toes. In my surprise, I was forced out of one way of being and into another. When I returned to the first way of being, I was not quite the same.

I was forced to remember there was something in me besides this mind working so hard and so monotonously, and that this body could appear to be not just for the use of this mind, to be alone with it for long periods of time, that this body and this mind could be social things.