I finished high school moved to Nashville for college and set out to break into the music business. Every night when I called home with news of my experiences my mom and dad would encourage me to keep taking those small steps.

I was who I was in high school in accordance with the rules of conduct for a normal person like obeying your mom and dad. Then I got out of high school and moved out of the house and I just started for lack of a better term running free.

People who have not done their research on me do not know that I am European born in Copenhagen Denmark to an Italian father from Napoli and a mother from Alabama who was singing opera and went to Europe met my dad fell in love and then moved back to Rome where I was raised between Rome and Hamburg.

My parents moved to American Samoa when I was three or four years old. My dad was principal of a high school there. It was idyllic for a kid. I had a whole island for a backyard. I lived there until I was eight years old and we moved to Santa Barbara.

My dad worked two jobs and moved us to the suburbs and just being a black person I went through a lot of racism and being called names and being bullied every single day. And it was hard. I didn't have any friends.

When I moved out of London 13 years ago I found a whole other reason not to drive. This was because my new husband Dan unlike my dad did drive and this became a great source of fun and adventure.

I didn't know my Dad - he moved out early. And my mom's politics were kind of hardscrabble. She didn't think about Democrats or Republicans. She thought about who made sense. I've been both in my life.

My dad was a bartender. My mom was a cashier a maid and a stock clerk at K-Mart. They never made it big. They were never rich. And yet they were successful. Because just a few decades removed from hopelessness they made possible for us all the things that had been impossible for them.

My family moved - first to Washington D.C. and then in the spring of 1975 to Lebanon where my father worked as a diplomat at the American embassy. My parents were enthusiastic about the move so my older brother and I felt like we were off to some place kind of cool.

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers essentially a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.