Lea Michele Reveals Her Glee-ful Highlight of 2015

For Lea Michele, 2015 will definitely go down as a year to remember. Not only did the 29-year-old actress release her second empowering book, You First: Journal Your Way to Your Best Life, but she also said goodbye to a major chapter in her career and hello to a new one. “This has been such an incredible year,” she tells InStyle. “It’s really been an extraordinary, incredibly wonderful year. I’m so very proud of myself more than anything for wrapping up Glee and jumping right into another television show playing a different character.”

Success may seem like a trait that naturally falls into the actress’s lap, but don’t think her accolades aren’t backed by a heavy dose of hard work. “I think definitely wrapping Glee was the highlight of the year. I found out about Scream Queens last year. That was so cool—getting that call from Ryan Murphy, finding that he was writing another character for me,” she says of her work. “I’m very, very, very proud of myself.” New roles aside, the beauty sure has a sense of humor about what she’d be doing were it not for both hit shows: “It was very good for me to jump into something else right away, because who knows what that post-Glee would have been like. I could have been sitting at home knitting hundreds of sweaters or something like that.”

We’re pretty sure the Hollywood favorite has nothing to worry about come 2016.

—With reporting by Brandi Fowler