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When I was younger, I felt very alone and that I didn't fit into my own skin. I loved the idea of becoming somebody else, and acting was an outlet for me and those emotions.
Specifically, my time in therapy has changed my life. It was such a relief to have a trained professional listen to my thoughts and help me positively restructure my thinking.
I think people are more alike than they are different, especially in high school. No matter what clique you belong to, everybody's trying to get approval and trying to fit in.
I was definitely always the bigger girl and kind of weird. I didn't make friends very easily and I was a big reader, so I was very antisocial, and I knew that people were judging me.
I've been singing since I was a kid, but I take my voice a lot more personally than my acting. I feel a lot more personal criticism when somebody tells you that you don't have a good voice.
Everybody has had that experience where your friend drags you to a party because the person they're crushing on is there, and you don't really want to be there but you go there with them anyway.
I didn't even have a career before 'Stranger Things' - it was my first acting job, my first time on a professional set, and my character wasn't even supposed to be a big deal - it all just exploded.
I didn't really have a normal high school experience. I was home-schooled and went to a co-op, so basically a school with about maybe 200 other home-schooled kids that would come together for classes.
Technology is a double-edged sword for sure. You can use it to get in touch with somebody, to get to know somebody, to have really meaningful conversations, or you can use it to hurt and bully people.
I feel that responsibility to really be authentic with people because I think that's what they deserve, especially in a time when it's very easy for people in the public eye to sort of cultivate an image.
I just think about little me - what it would have meant to me to see a chubby girl in movies and a big girl get the guy and be the princess, be the hero. I think that would've really changed a lot for me.
I think society is so hard on young women. Growing up, the images that I saw, the standards that I had to live up to in terms of how I looked and how I fit into my social groups - it was a lot of pressure.
I didn't get recognized a whole lot at first, but all of a sudden it just started happening. People would look at me out of the corner of their eye, deciding whether or not they were going to come up to me!
I've always felt, as a person, that I wanted to make people feel included and loved because I think at some point in all of our lives, we've felt not included and unworthy, especially in terms of appearances.
I related to 'Sierra' in the fact that I tend to come off as pretty confident in who I am, but definitely in high school I had a lot of insecurity and was unsure if I should be changing myself to fit in more.
There's this book that I love called 'Eleanor & Park.' It's an incredible story about these two misfit kids who fall in love. I've loved that book for years and I'd be so thrilled if I got to be in an adaptation of that.
I think we take our friends for granted a lot in high school. We're so busy worrying about our own problems that we ignore the fact that we have these people who are supporting us and taking care of us like all the time.
I think there were so many times that I just felt so overwhelmed by school and by my relationships with my friends and I felt like I was going to be stuck in high school forever and I was never going to achieve my dreams.
The idea that I get to kind of redefine what is beautiful and whose story deserves to be told and showcase that you know, big women have love lives and complex colorful lives like everybody else, that's really important to me.
It's movies like 'Love, Simon' that are so pivotal because it's this sweet rom-com that you would watch about a straight couple, but it's two guys. It feels natural and real and just charming. I would love to see more movies like that.
I had this incredible opportunity with 'Stranger Things,' and now all it tells me is that people like my work, so I need to keep working. I need to push forward and put as much of my heart into every character I play as I did into Barb.
I certainly hope that we will get more women in power, when it comes to executives and producers and directors, because the problem is not a shortage of females who are qualified to do the job. It's just that women are not favoured or chosen.
There's such a stigma around mental illness, and this idea that you're going to come off as disturbed or weak somehow by being open about these things. I've never felt embarrassed or shy talking about it; it's such an integral part of my life.
I think people find it so easy to write off teenagers and millennials as just being like these shallow, self-centered people who don't have anything real going on and who are always just on their cell phones. But being a teenager is really hard.
I do think technology really has changed the way that we communicate with each other and texting can be the way to communicate and to kind of get up the nerve to say things that maybe you wouldn't say in real life, but that also comes with a price.
I guess everyone's had an experience when they felt overlooked, ditched, hurt or taken for granted. Where they felt like the only one behaving with common sense but still got the short end of the stick. We all feel like the odd one out at some point.
I think the media in general hasn't been very kind to fat women or fat people. We see so many insensitive portrayals of plus-sized people. That kind of stuff really affected me - not even necessarily the portrayal of fat people, but the absence of fat people.
I had a really, really bad case of it. Everybody hears OCD and they think, 'Okay, you like to clean or be organized.' That's really not what it is, especially not for everybody. In my case, it was me being super self-conscious, to the point where it was debilitating.
As fun as it is to be the nerdy best friend. I'm capable of more than that, and I feel that I have emotions to share, and there are roles I can add something to. I just hope there are other people who are willing to take that chance on me and let me tell their stories.
It's something that I feel every young person goes through, this idea that they're not doing enough, or that they're stuck. Definitely when I was in high school I was like, 'What am I doing here, I want to be an actor, instead I'm just stuck at school and I'm not doing anything.'
I was diagnosed with OCD and depression, and that was a huge relief, because now my struggles had a name and could be reckoned with. With a combination of therapy and medication, I got better. I learned to love life again. My problems didn't go away, but they became much easier to face.
I do feel like young people feel pressured to be extraordinary in a new way. Of course everybody is extraordinary in their own special way... but not everybody has been an activist, or volunteered somewhere incredible, or has perfect scores. So it's a lot of pressure to put on young people.
At some point, I stumbled across an article about OCD. As I read, I was blown away by how identical the writer's description was to what I was experiencing. It was overwhelmingly comforting to finally realize that I wasn't alone and that nothing was wrong with me. It was a treatable disorder.
I'm excited to see a new age of rom-coms, and especially teen romantic comedies, because when I was younger, I was watching 'Harry Potter' and 'Hunger Games' and stuff like that. I loved those movies, but they are a little bit heavy. We didn't really get to have the lighthearted love stories.
When you're on stage, you're playing to whoever is in the back of the room, and TV and film is so much more detailed and nuanced, but I think that's what I always wanted to do. As much as I love theater and musical theater and would love to do it again, I really love the subtleties of film and theater acting.
Acting isn't always about the amount of talent you have, or your ability to cry on command. The point is, how well can you take direction? How well can you put aside your own ideas or ego and listen to the ideas of the director and the people above you, while not giving up the passion and drive of that character?
It's very important to me that people know that depression doesn't discriminate. A lot of people look at people who have depression and think that it's not legitimate because they're wealthy or it looks like everything seems to be doing fine. But it doesn't pick and choose. It can affect anybody in the brain, no matter how perfect your life seems.