Dec. 12 (UPI) -- Lea Michele stopped by Ellen on Thursday to perform her first-ever single, "Cannonball," but she also sat down to discuss how she's coping with grief after boyfriend Cory Monteith's sudden passing.
"It's certainly been a pretty rough year," the 27-year-old Glee star told DeGeneres. "But I've been surrounded by such great people, such great family."
Michele said that returning to the Glee set helped her deal with her grief, when being at home was no easier than being at work.
What people also don't understand is that going to work is no harder than being at home and being in the house and opening up a closet and seeing a pair of shoes. There's this grief [that] goes with you everyday whatever you're doing. When there's great moments, hard moments. So I'd rather, for me, be at work with the people who I love that are going through the same thing. It obviously has it's own triggers, but at the end of the day I feel so safe there. And like I said, they're my family.
"I'm really feeling like I'm still trying to figure out all of this," Michele added, noting that it's "only been a few months" since Monteith died.
Michele said she "literally lived every day of my life feeling like the luckiest girl in the whole world."
"I think at a certain point you can choose to sort of fall from this or you can choose to rise. And that's what I'm just trying to do my best for him, because I know that that's what he would have wanted," she said.
Later, Michele performed her single "Cannonball." Her debut album, Louder, drops in March.
