I try things even when I'm completely petrified and completely insecure about whether I can do
it. And, but I just keep on trying. First she fainted at church at age 7. Then she had to learn
to take charge. Small and brave, Sonia Sotomayor started giving herself daily shots. She has not
stopped. Tell us how illness made you stronger. I have juvenile diabetes and I was diagnosed at
7 and a half years old. I suspect, and I think I know, that any child who has a chronic disease
of any kind learns two things from that disease: discipline, because you have to become disciplined
in taking care of yourself in order to survive; and creativity. raised in a Puerto Rican family in
the Bronx with the help of a devoted grandmother, she taught herself how to sterilize needles for
her own insulin injections to keep from relying on feuding parents with marital problems. My mom and
dad had their challenges. My dad, as I described in my book, was an alcoholic. And his drinking
created a great deal of friction in our home. He and my mom argued a lot. My grandmother was
my haven of safety, and so I loved going to see her. I knew that my grandmother couldn't give me a
shot. And if I wanted to stay with her I needed to do it myself. Her father died when she was nine. I
watched my mother for a year being deeply, deeply depressed. And I was actually very worried about
losing her too. And when she finally came out of her depression I was relieved, and that started
a new road in our lives. A road that led Sonia Sotomayor to becoming a great student. She gave
me something very, very important: she taught me the value of education. My, for my mother
education came before everything else in her and our lives. She's scrimped and saved to send us to
Catholic school, my brother and I, because it was better than the local public schools in the poor
neighborhood I was growing up in. she saved to buy and Encyclopedia Britannica for us. We were
the only kids in the projects that had books that were so rich with information. I remember
sitting and opening up a book almost every week, I would take a book and explore it. How did you
learn to study? I asked. That's actually the most important ingredient for success. When you don't
know something, ask someone who does how to do it. She asked one of the smartest students in
her fifth-grade class. And she told me what she did - that she read whatever our assignment was,
and then she took a pen or a, or pencil and underlined the important parts of it. Have
you always been curious? Yes. You have to be interested in what you don't know. I think that
the most interesting people are those that are curious about the world around them. You say there
is one most important question. What is it? Why. Every time I have a legal question, I ask, "what's
my purpose?" The "why am I doing this?" Once I've identified the purpose I then asked myself, "so
how do I do it?" And once I've asked how do I do it, the third question is, "is there a better way
to do it?" And now Justice Sotomayor is inspiring others by making history. Her best-selling memoir
is highly acclaimed as candid and compelling. She is the first Hispanic Justice to serve on
the Supreme Court. What is it like for her to wear that mantle? I don't wear it. You represent the
law as a Justice. Your obligation is to interpret it, interpret it according to the precedents that
we've established regarding the issues that come before us. That doesn't permit you to wear a
mantle for others. What it feels like, however, for me is very gratifying to know that there are
a group of people, Hispanics, who otherwise felt alienated from the court, from any connection
to it as in a government institution, who now look at my presence there as an inspiration for
themselves and their children. And that's, if that's a mantle, that's a nice mantle to wear.