When Jennifer Aniston was presented with a lifetime achievement award at Europe’s largest festival for children, Giffoni Film Fest, she was particualrly moved by one teenage girl’s question about bullying.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the softly spoken girl stepped forward and asked Jen if she ever woke up in the morning and didn’t know who she was.
She wiped away tears as she gave her answer:
“There are not enough fingers and toes in this entire room to count how many times that moment has happened to me,” she said. “We’re all human beings at the end of the day, whether we’re a waitress or a baker or a student or whatever we are, at the end of the day you kind of hit walls and think I kind of can’t go any farther. Or this is too much. My heart can’t take it or the pain is too great, or am I good enough? Will I survive? And you just have to sort of somehow miraculously overcome. You just go, ‘I can’t, yes I can, yes you can.’”
“And also know that your actors, your idols, your icons, whatever you call them, have all had that experience in their lives many, many times,” she continued. “There’s nothing that separates us from you, because we all started at the same place. We all came out of nowhere. Don’t punish yourself if you feel that. Go talk to people and seek help and always find something to inspire you.”
When asked about bullying, she encouraged people to stand up to bullies – as this is the only way a problem like this is going to be solved.
“When you see a bully, you have to, in a group of you, take the bully down and not allow it,” she said, answered by roaring applause. “You have to support each other in just eliminating that. People didn’t stick up to bullies enough.”
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She was also asked how we could improve the stories about women being told, and she said it was time everyone out there got writing.
“I think we need to empower women to not just be about dresses and beauty and selfies. We need to start having conversations and put our phones down and get out of social media, take social media breaks,” she said. “That’s why we’re not seeing the right stories being told, because everyone is stuck in their phones.”
Her talk comes after she recently penned a powerful letter on pregnancy rumours in the media.