Yes, there were eight men who defiled me, raped me, but that didn't go into my consciousness.

I lose consciousness after a while, and wake up in the cell.

Because before the Vagina Monologues, I will say that 80 percent of my consciousness was closed off to what was really going on in this reality.

And I looked down at my body and I thought, Whoa, I'm a weird looking thing. And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I'm the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience.

Growing up in Macedonia in the 1980s, my awareness of global politics was very much influenced by pop music, as a number of A list artists during that era released huge hits addressing political issues, some of which were considered quite controversial at the time.