Enter Hooters. In my twenty-year-old brain, I knew I was cute, so I thought: cute + Hooters = better tips. I applied, got the job, and told my parents.

"I don't see anything wrong with that," my mom said. "You're not showing anything. It's just a restaurant." Mom had never actually been to a Hooters.

Dad, on the other hand, had and so was less enthusiastic about my newfound employment.

"Hey, Dad," I said, "you work near the restaurant. Will you come to Hooters for lunch?"

"No," he said. "I will never, ever, come in and watch you work at Hooters."

As it turned out, Hooters may have been a job for bimbos, but it was not a job for slackers. They were incredibly strict about your appearance (I know, I know, big surprise, right?). The T-shirts were tight, white, and said "Hooters" on the front. The slogan on the back summed up the whole experience: "Delightfully tacky yet unrefined." As a waitress, you were not allowed to have stains on your shirt or runs in your hosiery. To add insult to injury, if you snagged your pantyhose in the middle of a shift, you had to hurry back to the break room and use your own money to buy a new pair from a vending machine. The signature Hooters shade was "suntan." Let me tell you, it looked great on anyone who wasn't white. (Read: it looked awful.)

Every hour on the hour, they would play a horrible country song on the loudspeakers, and all the waitresses had to stop what they were doing, jump up on the tables, and do a choreographed line dance. Mind you—people were eating at these tables! And that, Mom, is when it wasn't just a restaurant.

My only solace was when Madison would come to visit me, usually because I'd made her. She is pretty much guaranteed entrance into heaven just based upon the number of fried pickles she has eaten in the name of keeping her increasingly depressed best friend company.

One of the other waitresses at Hooters soon hooked me up with a fake ID. It was her cousin's old driver's license, and even though the photo was of a slightly overweight Mexican girl, it either looked enough like me to work, or the clubs where I used it really did not give a shit about underage drinking.

One of my other coworkers was an ex–pageant girl from Texas, and she and her mother had moved out to LA, convinced that this beauty queen was going to be a star. It was from these southern women that I decided to take my beauty tips, and her mom taught me how to do my own hair extensions. We'd buy the weaves from beauty-supply stores, and then instead of sewing them in like normal people do, she taught me how to glue them to my scalp with an incredibly toxic rubber cement that smelled like paint. On top of that, I tried to turn my black hair, both real and fake, blond by dying it myself. It lightened into an awful, acrid shade of orange—you know, that really special hair color that just screams "I buy all my beauty products at Big Lots." I paired this gorgeous styling with a push-up bra, and the overall look may be best described as "budget porn star."

After our shifts at Hooters, we'd hit the clubs in Hollywood—places that had Roman numerals for names or were called just one word, like Noise or Room. The kind of places that preferred their female clientele look like baby hookers. It was through this new crew of girlfriends and our totally classy scene that I met Barry, an older man who was completely infatuated with me. Barry was in his midthirties and would come into Hooters with his friend Steve. Hookers—I mean Hooters—encouraged the waitresses to sit down and chat with the customers. During one such tableside chat, someone invited Barry and Steve to go out with us that night, an invite that they were more than eager to accept.

I found Barry pretty gross, but with encouragement from my friends, who all seemed to have sugar daddies of their own, I let him give me three hundred dollars a month under the auspices of "helping me out." I was still too naive to understand that these financial installments—in cash—meant that eventually Barry was going to expect me to not just look like a prostitute but act like one too.

When it became clear to him that I was never going to sleep with him—probably because I said, "I am never going to sleep with you"—his e-mails and calls became more and more frequent and frantic. I tried lying and telling him I'd found Jesus and turned my life around, but that just seemed to turn him on more. Finally, when I was flat-out scared and felt like I had a stalker, I got up the courage to tell my dad that this time I'd really, really fucked up.

I've rarely seen my dad so mad—at me and at Barry—and he promptly called Barry and threatened to simultaneously kill him and have him thrown in jail. Watching my father do this, and knowing that I'd put him in a position that made him both angry and uncomfortable, was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life.

My whole life was humiliating at this point. There were tons of movie studios nearby, and studio guys would come in all the time and try to flirt with me. No matter that it was the middle of a Wednesday afternoon and they clearly had no better place to be, they'd still try to chat me up in a condescending way. Slurping the wing sauce from their fingers and smiling up at me, they'd say, "Are you an actress?"

Barf. Even when such salacious questions didn't make me throw up in my mouth, I was usually too embarrassed to say yes.

I didn't much feel like an actress anyway. I hadn't booked a part in more than two years, and my auditions had dried up. I wasn't even in college, and the only good thing about my career was that I occasionally got free mozzarella sticks. It's totally normal to be in your late teens and early twenties and still figuring it out and making horrible decisions. But to me, figuring it out just felt like fucking up. I'd been really young when I had a taste of what I wanted to do—everything else was bitter in comparison.

Deep down, I knew I had more in me. If I wasn't living up to my potential, I had no one to blame but myself. I couldn't even blame my dad for making me pay rent.

NAUGHTY IN NEW YORK

By the time I was staring down the barrel of my twenties, life had kicked me in the ass enough to make me think it was time for a plan B (and no, not the contraceptive). My first step toward getting back on track was obvious: get the hell out of Hooters. I quit and threw my stupid suntan pantyhose and that horrible T-shirt in the trash. I unglued all the hair that hadn't actually grown out of my head, and I moved the Wonderbras to the back of the underwear drawer.

I applied for and got a job as a manager at the Michael Kors in the Topanga mall (I lied on my résumé—again—but they were just tiny little white lies). And I enrolled again in community college, this time vowing not to drop any of my classes.

I cut ties with my trashy friends and spent my nights studying. I actually got good grades in all my classes and started to realize that maybe I hadn't given myself enough credit before. I'd fallen back on my looks over and over because I didn't think I had anything else to offer, but now I was starting to see that I was actually smart. Getting a graded paper on which the professor wrote "well written!" felt a million times better than getting a 25 percent tip because some d-bag got to ogle my butt when I dropped off his burger.

In my classes, I discovered that I most enjoyed writing. I started to think about screenwriting as a potential career path, figuring that if I couldn't be in front of the camera, I could at least be behind it. I did some research and came across a three-month program at the New York Film Academy. I gave my dad the hard sell, and he agreed that it sounded like a good idea (he was probably also still thinking that it would be a good idea to get me three thousand miles away from Barry). The program cost ten thousand dollars, and though he didn't have a ton of money, he agreed to split it with me. My mom told me that right before I turned eighteen, she had squirreled away part of my Coogan account to protect it from my spending sprees, and I used that to pay for the other half.

I enrolled in the program and bought myself a ticket to New York—one with three stops along the way, because I didn't want to waste money on a nonstop flight. We had some family friends who lived in New Jersey, and I stayed with them and commuted into the city for class each day. The commute took two and a half hours: I took two buses, a long subway ride, and then walked the final twenty blocks, which, being from California, was probably the most I'd ever walked in my entire life.

Still, I could not have been happier. Even when I was sitting in a smelly seat on a bus going over the George Washington Bridge, I felt amazing. I was finally doing something with my life and making my own decisions as opposed to just going with the flow. I hardly knew anyone, which was also a relief. In LA, it seemed like I couldn't go to Starbucks without running into some guy I went to middle school with or some girl I used to see at auditions.

After a month of that hellacious commute, my friends hooked me up with an apartment in Manhattan, at Fifty-Eighth and Eighth, which was unoccupied but owned by people they knew, and where I could live rent-free for the next two months. It wasn't really furnished, but I didn't care. When I got my tax refund, I went to Bed Bath & Beyond and bought new sheets for the bed, feeling like a queen. The apartment had no TV, and I could only get Internet in the laundry room. I didn't have much money, but there was a little Mexican restaurant around the corner, and I would go there, sit by myself, and make one margarita last for hours while I people watched.

The first month of the program was all about developing our ideas. We'd come up with several and throw them out to the rest of the group for feedback. I had one idea for a super dark drama that was inspired by listening to Adele's "Hometown Glory" nonstop, but I also had an idea for a teenage comedy that everyone seemed to really like, so I set about putting that one down on paper.

My screenplay was called "Naughty," and it was about two high school girls who are best friends and outcasts. One is slightly overweight, and her skinny friend has stringy hair and wears glasses. Through some twist of the high school rumor mill, everyone thinks they're lesbians, and they decide to go along with it as part of an elaborate plot to get the guys they really like to hang out. One of the girls has a hot older sister who is their mentor and gives them blow job lessons on a banana. The climax (no pun intended) occurs when their parents find out about their doings and stage an intervention, complete with a poster of a pregnant teenage Jamie Lynn Spears with the words "Don't let this be you."

The screenplay was sexy and funny, and I loved watching people laugh out loud as they read it. It didn't feel as amazing as delivering a punch line while the cameras were rolling, but it still felt pretty damn good, and I knew that I was talented. The credits that I earned at the film academy transferred to my community college, so when I got back to LA, I only needed one more year before I could transfer to a four-year school. I'd had such a great experience in New York that I couldn't wait to go back. I started looking into transferring to film school at NYU or the creative-writing program at Columbia. I got a job as a nanny and started to pay down my credit cards and save whatever money I could. I was done with being an actress.

I called my mom to say, "I, Naya Rivera, am quitting acting."

"You can't do that," she said.

"Mom, I can," I said. "I don't know if you've noticed, but this whole thing isn't exactly taking off. I'm drowning in debt. I have to make some money. I need a real job."

Mom still wasn't buying it. "Give it six months," she said. "Go on every audition you can. Don't be picky or think anything is beneath you. Just go, but keep going to school too. Just give it six months, and see what happens."

I felt like I owed it to my mom. She'd put so much of herself into my acting career, and for a while we'd had a really good run. When I was sixteen, I'd told her I didn't want her to be my manager anymore, which was just one example of how I wasn't always the easiest to deal with or the most grateful. My career was as much hers as it was mine. Plus, she's almost six feet tall and a woman to be reckoned with, even over the phone.

"Fine," I told her. "I'll give it six months." This didn't change how I felt inside, though, and I kept looking for apartments in New York the whole time.

STANDING IN FRONT OF YOUR FAMILY WITH NO CLOTHES ON

Mom was right about one thing: I could be picky about auditions, and that was because I secretly hated them. As a kid, I'd been super competitive about auditions and treated the whole thing like a sport. I'd sneak away when my mom wasn't looking and go put my ear up to the door, to see if I could hear those other little girls blowing it. I would listen to my pigtailed nemesis squeak out a song and think, "She sounds awful! I'm the best singer! I've got this one in the bag."

As I got older, though, my confidence became more and more shaky. Auditions are the most nerve-racking thing about being an actor, and the whole process feels like standing in front of your family with no clothes on.

The first part of an audition is a preread, where you just read lines for a casting director who doesn't even pretend to give a shit. Sometimes it's a taped preread, which means you're reading lines for a young assistant with a camera and a lady who doesn't give a shit. Woof. Good luck with your small talk.

If you're lucky enough to make it past that initial read, you move on to a producer session. At this level, the people you read for have a little more invested in the project, so they're cordial and want to joke around and get to know you. You can breathe a sigh of relief, because while you might still feel like you're talking to a chair, at least that chair talks back.

When someone is looking for a certain type, auditions can make you feel like a generic clone. Say you arrive at an audition where they're looking for a girl who is described as "a hot, exotic-looking female." Well, crap—there are going to be twenty hot, exotic-looking girls in that waiting room, so you just have to sit there, trying to not sweat through your shirt and hoping that you're the hottest of the twenty.

An anthropologist or psychologist would have a field day in an audition waiting room, because it is definitely a personality case study. Every comedian exits with the same line: "Well, I just killed it in there, and they told me to tell you that you can all just go on home. Don't worry, I nailed it, so everyone can just go back to their car."

Or all the Chatty Cathys who want to talk the whole time and then, as they walk out the door, feel the compulsion to raise their voices several octaves and screech "Gooooooddddd luuuuccckkkk" to everyone who is still waiting. It's as awkward as it sounds, especially when you've been auditioning your whole life.

Or there's someone there whose birthday party you cried at in second grade, or someone that you know, firsthand, is a horrible kisser.

So for me to tell my mom that I would keep going to auditions even though I didn't really want to, well, it was no small commitment. After she gave me her pep talk, I went on two.

The first was for CSI: Miami, a totally cheesy show that I would have turned my nose up at before, if only because deep down I thought I wouldn't get it. The part I auditioned for was a heroin addict who gets electrocuted. My expectations were low, and to prep for the disappointment, I reminded myself that no one would think I could convincingly play a heroin addict. But to my surprise, I got it!

As soon as I was on set, I was myself again. I still loved it as much as I had as a kindergartner. I was completely comfortable and felt at home amidst the wardrobe fittings and the dry sandwiches in craft services and the trip-inducing wires crisscrossing the floor.

In my scene, I'm ambling down the sidewalk in a miniskirt and mules when I'm abducted by a serial killer, who strangles me in the alley before he takes me back to his lair, attaches a few jumper cables to my fingers, and BRRRZZZTTTT. I was on-screen for less than a minute but made the most of it. I screamed and thrashed like a banshee; this was also the first time a part had required me to cry on command. As I walked off set, the script supervisor stopped me.

"You're really good," she said. "You should have your own show."

This was the confidence boost I sorely needed at that moment. Compliments are tricky business: when the people who love you the most and know you the best tell you that you're good at something, it's super easy to dismiss it. "They're just trying to make me feel better," you can tell yourself. "They don't really mean it." But I took this stranger's words to heart: she had nothing invested in me. She didn't have to say anything.

I had gone to the CSI audition purely out of love for my mom—my heart wasn't in it. I was finally letting go of the dreams that I'd held on to, white knuckled, for most of my short life.

My mom has always said that what's meant for you is meant for you, and nothing's going to change that. You have to trust the universe, and trust God, that things are going to work out exactly as they should. At age twenty, I already knew that rejection was a huge part of being an actor, but I still took it personally every time I didn't get a part. I'd cry and get depressed, convinced that it was going to be like this for the rest of my life, even when the part I was up for was just a small one. But through all of it, I'd kept going, and that had at least kept me sharp. Even when I didn't care half as much as I used to, I could still put on a good show for the young assistant with a camera and the lady who didn't give a shit.

In addition to CSI, I'd only gone on one other audition. I'd cared so little about it that I smoked a cigarette right before I went in, even though I knew I had to sing. As I was walking back to my trailer after shooting the electrocution scene, still high from the script supervisor's kind words, I checked my voice mail. I had one message, from my agent, telling me I'd booked this thing called Glee.

SORRY:

Hooking up with a married dude.At-home highlights and DIY hair extensions: some things are best left to the experts, and hair dye is one of them.Fried pickles. Madison, I am so very sorry.Thinking my (spectacular) boobs were my best asset, and not my brain.Accepting "free" money from anyone, ever.Hooters. Everything Hooters.

NOT SORRY:

Lying on my résumé when I knew I could handle a retail job.Listening to my mom.Getting those "figuring it out" years out of the way early.Being open to a back-up plan.Getting fired—try everything once!Three planes, a train, and two buses to get to New York. Hey, whatever it takes . . .