Several months after announcing her divorce from her second husband, Reese Witherspoon is opening up in a big way.
While speaking with attendees of her Hello Sunshine’s Shine Away event, Witherspoon explained that she’s been focusing “really hard to find balance outside of work. I’m a person who fills my schedule with busyness so that I feel less alone or less nervous or less unsettled.”
That’s when the actress showed her vulnerable side realizing that there became a point where she could no longer hide behind her work. “I started to realize that isn’t going to work for me. About a year ago, I was like, ‘I was a robot and the robot broke.’ I cried and cried.”
It was also during this time that Witherspoon was going through a divorce from her ex-husband Jim Toth. As Mamas Uncut previously reported, she and Toth were married for 12 years before listing “irreconcilable differences” as the reason for their divorce.
The documents also shared that the couple already has a pre-nuptial agreement between the two of them. The couple shares custody of their son, Tennessee.
Witherspoon told the audience that was hard for her to admit publicly. “It actually makes me feel very vulnerable sharing that with you all. But I think it’s important.”
The Hollywood icon continued adding that it is important to think about yourself once in a while even when so many others are also depending on you.
“We hold up so much for so many. My beautiful friend, Cleo Wade, just wrote this gorgeous poem … about the glue in people’s lives. And sometimes you are the glue in everybody’s life, whether it’s at work or being a mom or being a partner, but who is holding you together, you know? It’s really important to remember.”
Witherspoon said she broke down when she realized she hadn’t been “taking very good care of myself. I wasn’t asking other people for help.”
“I feel like I’ve learned a lot because I did the work – the hard work – in my early 20s, and reading every book and every self-help book and going to therapy and really trying to understand myself and forgive the parts of myself that were broken and the parts of myself where I felt like a failure, because it was a huge part of it.”
She’s also changed her mindset. “Instead of thinking of it as a failure, I think, ‘Gosh, I’ve learned so much from that moment.’ And I don’t blame others. I just reward myself for the hard things that little Reese went through.”