I think growing up in skating, I was surrounded by the LGBT community, so I grew up very aware because I was around it so often, and some of the kindest people I know are gay figure skaters.

You should not be defined by one bad performance.

I just believe in equality for all.

I went through my awkward teenage years. I don't want to go back.

My mother Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck was a pianist who studied with Dame Myra Hess and Tobias Matthey. As a child in California I used to listen to her play Chopin.

In my Scandinavian-American family, we were conditioned never to sit, at least not comfortably. I was endlessly going back to work. We longed for the fleeting respite of being useful and regarded sleep as a reward for exhaustion, always to be deferred until after the sun goes down.

Being on 'Glee' was amazing. I remember my first day on set, my first day I arrived to the set I was in my trailer and all of the actors came and banged on my door - Lea Michele, Chris Colfer, Amber Riley, Naya Rivera. They all welcomed me with open arms, so it was a great experience. It felt like family, and I miss them a lot over there.

My mother speaks of my step being a source of life-long pain to her, that it is a living death, etc. By the same post I had several letters from anxious relatives, telling me that it was my duty to come home and thus ease my mother's anxiety.