Amma would say to me, when I was a young teenager, “Don’t do anything that you wouldn’t feel comfortable being printed in the headlines of all the newspapers the next day.” At first, I had taken Amma’s words as a warning. I thought she was telling me, “Keep it clean.” But later, I reconsidered her words, converting what I’d previously internalized as a call toward shame into an argument against it. Amma wasn’t saying to keep it clean, I decided. She was saying, let the dirt be known. She knew, after all, that things could never stay clean. Amma had tasted the blood. She’d meant, I decided, that I should own my life. Claim it. Every last drop.