With the end of Glee’s third season and the...

With the end of Glee’s third season and the graduation of so many of our favorite characters, I’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic. I present to you… the very first time that I met Chris Colfer back on August 21, 2009 at The Gleek Tour in DC. I can’t get over how young we look! It’s strange how this day feels like ages ago, and yet I can remember it like it was yesterday.

I had been talking to some of the cast (Chris included) over Twitter for a couple months, and so I was really excited to get to meet them in person for the first time. I remember at one point I was talking to Chris, and one of the people handling the event asked me, “Are you ready to interview Cory Monteith?” The way they said it implied that I must be most excited to talk to one of the biggest stars of the show, and Chris jokingly responded, “Oh, don’t mind me. It’s not like I’m a lead or anything.” It’s funny that there was a time where Kurt was seen as a minor character, and Chris wasn’t yet the star he is now.

If you’d asked me that day if I ever thought Glee would sell out massive arena tours, and that I’d get to go backstage at them, I would have laughed. I’m still blown away by how far Glee has come. I spent an entire summer telling everyone with ears about it, because nobody really had heard of it at the time. A year later I saw them perform in NYC at Radio City Music Hall, and a year after that I saw them twice at the IZOD just outside New York. (If you’re interested, I posted photos and stories of me with the cast here.) All of the memories I made at the Glee events and concerts are some of my fondest. It was a dream of mine since I was very young to go to NYC, and it wasn’t until Glee toured there that I was finally able to convince my family to let me go. I even got to bring along one of my best friends for the adventure. (Here’s my post all about that amazing trip, photos included.)

Now, as I’m getting ready to pack up and move to Los Angeles for the summer to intern at Fox Broadcasting, I can’t help but get emotional over all the ways Glee has changed my life. This summer is an opportunity I would have never been given had it not been for my involvement with the Glee fandom. The cast was so supportive when I reached out to them on Twitter long ago. (Many of them only had a few hundred Twitter followers, so those were the days when a ‘nobody’ could actually get in touch with them relatively easily.) Everyone I’ve spoken to at Fox Broadcasting has been unbelievable kind, and even reached out to help me when I wasn’t expecting it at all. This internship in Los Angeles will honestly change my life, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

Thank you to everyone in the Glee cast and crew who has been so kind to me. Thank you to everyone at Fox Broadcasting for appreciating all of the fans, me included. And thank you, most of all, to everyone who has followed me on Twitter over the last three years. I never would have been able to do any of this without your support—seriously. Thank you.