I remember feeling a huge amount of anxiety and worry and pressure. At that point I was headed into acting school. That was 100 percent the only thing I thought I wanted to do. But then I got through my first year of college, and I was, like, humming and rolling around, pretending to be a lion in acting classes at NYU and visiting our classmate Charlie Gregg at Harvard, where he was actually learning things. So I changed my mind: I decided I actually wanted a different kind of education, and that was an incredibly freeing idea.

Once again, I've been thwarted by the massive difference between my vision of the successful me and the me I'm currently stuck with.

Over and over in the play my character says, "I'm thirty-two years old," as if that should explain everything that's wrong in her life. I don't know what it's like to be thirty-two, but I can imagine. I imagine she means she's stuck in an in-between time, she's at an age that isn't a milestone but more of a no-man's-land, an age where she's feeling like her hopes are fading.

I would like to be part of a family, however that looks. Family is really important to me.

I'm sure you've felt this way along the way: Yes, I got to do what I wanted to do. But it was much harder than I thought it was going to be, and it continues to be. You never get to a place that is a place of rest. I think that's OK. It's not bad - life is hard work!

We're all working hard, but so far away from what we actually want to be doing. We're all peering in at the window of a party we aren't invited to yet, a party we wouldn't know how to dress for, or what kind of conversation to make, even if we came as someone's guest.

I live with someone, actor Peter Krause, who didn't find an interest in being an actor until the very end of college. So my message is: There's so much freedom left. There's no ticking clock. It's just not true.