Growing up, I was a very shy, wallflower type. I was not a nerd, but not popular. I was just invisible, like that person you probably didn't know you were in school with.

I didn't want to go to college. I wanted to move to Los Angeles right out of high school.

When I'm writing my blog, I think of myself at 13 years old, back in St. Louis, daydreaming about Hollywood.

I think that there is a tragic misfit at the core of me, and I've just done a lot of work on myself. I love a good self-help book; I've read a ton of them. I love self-help seminars and therapy and all that. I think that probably, at my core, if I had done no work on myself, I would probably be Laura from The Mysteries Of Laura, but I worked hard to be a more stable person because that's what I wanted out of my life.

I knew I wanted to be an actor, and I didn't necessarily need or want to be famous or a celebrity actor. But I wanted to be somewhere where there would be no ceiling on what I could accomplish, and I felt like if I stayed in St. Louis I might have a really great regional theater career or something, but that I wasn't going to be able to get much further than that. And it felt like New York and L.A. were the two places where you could end up being a TV star or you could end up doing regional theater, which would have been fine as well.

I don't have real big aspirations to be a movie star. I would love to be on a long-running hit TV show. You end up playing a defining role.

I'm not one to air my dirty laundry for the whole world.