Herstedt said she's been out for a year now, but she still has "lingering fear" of what people will think when they learn she is a lesbian. So, she was hesitant to publicly participate at first.
But on Thursday, when she told her girlfriend Katia that she loved her for the first time, she "realized how crazy it was to feel the need to keep censoring that part of my life."
"I woke up this morning and made a vow to myself to not let some kind of internalized homophobia win and just share my life," Herstedt said.