Month: April 2023

Emily Blunt

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EMILY BLUNT

Emily landed her first professional job at the age of 18 playing Judi Dench’s granddaughter in the London stage production of A Royal Family.

“Judi taught me to make sure the job was as joyful as possible for yourself and for everyone around you. I’m so grateful for that role. Without it I may have been handcuffed to doing period dramas. It was the most incredible platform. You can’t out Julie Julie Andrews. That would just be a ridiculous idea. I made my own version, even though my children still cry out for the Julie Andrews version in our house. I didn’t win my own children over. It’s wonderful when you see them become their own little people. I think they come out the way they’re meant to. They’re like bowling balls. They come out, and you’re the bumpers trying to make sure they don’t get too hurt. But they’re on their own path. I’m so thankful I’ve been able to have the time together with my family because I think I will probably look back on it and realize how precious it’s really been. You get to rediscover the beauty of things by seeing life through their eyes. I count my blessings.” People Magazine

Laura Prepon

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LAURA PREPON

“I started by making gratitude lists. I write down, using pen and paper, 20 things I’m grateful for. I repeat many of the same things, but every time I write down those people or things (my husband Ben, my health, our children, our future grandchildren, my career, our homes, my friends, hot baths, nourishing food) my heart warms and my whole energy expands. The trick is to be honest about what I’m truly grateful for and not to force things. It’s okay if all I can muster is ‘this bed, this glass of wine, this Planet Earth series,’ as long as I’m telling my truth. After we lost the pregnancy, I started doing positive self-talk out loud to myself. I talked directly to my body. ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘for growing beautiful Ella.’ And as I thought of her, for the first time in days I started welling up with gratitude. ‘I trust we will do this again,’ I said as I remembered that about a fifth of all pregnancies don’t make it all the way. ‘You have a natural wisdom,’ I said, and my body does; I could feel it in my bones. Putting my hands on my head, I said, ‘I love you.’

Moving my hands to my face, I repeated, ‘I love you.’ I covered my arms, my belly, my butt, my legs, down my whole body, and ended at the tips of my toes, ‘I love you.’ And by the end of the exercise, I felt better. I felt connected to my body. I felt love for my body. I started doing this exercise every day, and my physical and mental well-being improved greatly. Then I started doing ‘the talk’ in the shower and it became a habit. You can apply this exercise to anything, whether you’re recovering from an injury or connecting with yourself after a lifetime of body-mind conflict. It’s about being in communication with yourself and appreciating what you have.” People Magazine

Priyanka Chopra

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PRIYANKA CHOPRA

“Each morning I’d have to walk down ‘Main Street’ a hallway that ran through the middle of the school where all the lockers were. Everyone hung out on those stairs between classes, and whenever I had to pass by, my bullies Jenny, a ninth grader, and a devoted group of her friends would yell out to me. ‘Brownie, go back to your country! Do you smell curry coming? Go back on the elephant you came on.’ “I tried to ignore them. I put my head down and made my way through that section of the hallway as quickly as I could. Then I tried avoiding Jenny and the other hecklers: I stopped taking the school bus; I stayed away from where they congregated. Sometimes I was alone; sometimes I was with my friends Camiele, Luba, and Forough, fellow outsiders who were treated exactly the same way I was. The four of us clung together, trying to create a sense of being cool and superior to combat the battering our egos were taking. But things eventually escalated. I was tired of being called names, having vile things written about me in the bathroom stalls, and getting shoved against lockers and buses. I’d spoken to my guidance counselor, but nothing much changed. I hadn’t wanted to involve them. My parents had raised me to be someone who finds solutions, and since I hadn’t been able to find a way to stop the bullying, I was starting to think that my solution was to go back home. I had been happy and confident when I arrived in Newton, but I couldn’t maintain my sense of self-worth. I started to believe that I was somehow less than those around me. I couldn’t sleep. My grades dropped. One call home was all it took. My parents heard my pain, confusion, and complete emotional exhaustion, and my mom was on the next plane with my brother. That day, as mom and I stuffed into a backpack what was inside the metal locker. All the bits and pieces of my thirteen months in Newton, who I’d been and who I was still becoming, it was hard not to feel like I’d failed. But slowly, over time, mom and dad each helped me to rebuild the confidence I’d lost.” People Magazine

Nick Jonas

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NICK JONAS

How did the bullying you experienced in high school there affect you?

“I took it very personally. Deep inside, it starts gnawing at you. You don’t even notice the way you’re acting and how you’re reacting. I went into a shell. I was like, ‘Don’t look at me. I just want to be invisible.’ My confidence was stripped. I’ve always considered myself a confident person, but I was very unsure of where I stood, of who I was.”

After a year of it, you finally told your parents and moved back home. How did you rebuild your self-esteem? 

“A lot of kids go through this and don’t have the ability to get away from their tormentors. When I went back to India, I was surrounded by so much love and admiration for just who I was. My dad said, ‘Leave your baggage behind.’ And I tried to. In India I was in school, and I was onstage. I made new friends who were amazing and loving. I was doing teenage things, going to parties, having crushes, dating, the normal stuff. It just built me up.”  People Magazine

Selena Gomez

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SELEN GOMEZ

“At one point Instagram became my whole world, and it was really dangerous. In my early 20s, I felt like I wasn’t pretty enough. There was a whole period in my life when I thought I needed makeup and never wanted to be seen without it. The older I got, the more I evolved and realized that I needed to take control of what I was feeling. I wanted to be able to look in the mirror and feel confident to be who I am. Taking a break from social media was the best decision that I’ve ever made for my mental health. I created a system where I still don’t have my passwords. And the unnecessary hate and comparisons went away once I put my phone down. I’ll have a much better relationship with myself. I’m a big believer in therapy, and I always feel so confident when I’m taking care of myself. If I’m not in the best headspace and my friends invite me out, I won’t go. I’ve lost my sense of FOMO, which I’m proud of. Sometimes I push myself too much, and it catches up to me. But I try to balance out everything as best as I can. I like to be there for my friends and celebrate everyone. But I have to make sure that I’m OK, you know? Because if I’m not OK, I can’t be OK for other people. Changing the narrative of mental health and creating a curriculum that hopefully can be implemented in schools or a system for resources that are easily available. I’m just so passionate about that, and I think I will continue to be for the rest of my life. Especially since the pandemic, there are so many people I know who craved help but had no idea how to get it. I have big aspirations for that field and really want to implement more education behind it.” InSTYLE 

Lewis Hamilton

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LEWIS HAMILTON

“We limit ourselves the majority of the time. And where it really hit me hard is: We should never have to dim our light in order to make others feel… If anything, we should shine as bright as we can to liberate others to do the same. I live my life by that quote. For so long in my life, I felt like I was dimming my light because I felt uncomfortable. When I was at school, I was dyslexic and struggling like hell. And one of the only few black kids in my school, being put in the lowest classes and never given a chance to progress or even helped to progress. Teachers were telling me, ‘You’re never going to be nothing.’ I remember being behind the shed, in tears, like ‘I’m not going to be anything’. And believing it for a split second. The most demotivating thing to hear, especially when you witness them doing the complete opposite with your white counterparts. I don’t actually hold any grudge against those people, because they fueled me up. There’s a lot of feelings that I suppressed at the time that I didn’t even realize that I suppressed, emotions and feelings that I had when I was younger and it all came up. There was a lot of the N-word going around. Go back to your country. Even today, I remember how terrifying it was. I really, really couldn’t understand it. It was like, are they talking to me? I’m from here. What do they mean? I could never understand it. When you’re being attacked, there’s this fear, there’s fear, and there’s anger as well because you want to get them back for the pain that they’re causing you. I never spoke about it to my parents. I didn’t speak about it to my mum, I didn’t think she’d understand. And my dad, I was probably too scared to tell my dad, because I didn’t want him to think I was a wuss. You know, I didn’t want him to think I couldn’t defend myself. I just remember a lot of times just being alone, just in tears in my room.

I love music so much. I would say music saves me every single day. People say ‘Lewis Hamilton’s doing music? Oh, I’m sure that’s going to suck.’ It’s only when they hear stuff that I do, then they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re actually pretty good.'” Vanity Fair

Gwyneth Paltrow

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GWYNETH PALTROW

“I won an Oscar when I was 26, I was really young. My philosophy is that fame is not very good for us as people because everybody starts removing obstacles and I think all of your friction is actually what makes you grow and so all of a sudden I was this pretty young woman and everyone was removing my obstacles and I got to stop waiting in line etc. Whatever the case was, and I think incrementally, I started just behaving a little strangely or a little weird. And my father sat me down one day and he said in his inimitable Brooklyn way, ‘Um, you’re kind of turning into an a******.”’