Reese Witherspoon Vulnerably Shares That She Fell Apart and “Broke” a Year Ago: “I Cried and Cried”

Reese Witherspoon was extraordinarily and bravely candid and vulnerable as she opened up about personal challenges she faced a year ago, saying that she “cried and cried” after feeling like she was a robot that “broke,” E! News reports.

“I’ve been trying really hard to find balance outside of work,” Witherspoon said at her company Hello Sunshine’s Shine Away event in Los Angeles yesterday. “I’m a person who fills my schedule with busyness so that I feel less alone or less nervous or less unsettled.”

Witherspoon—who settled her divorce from Jim Toth in August after announcing their split in March—said that, while her work has always been a major part of her life, “I started to realize that isn’t going to work for me,” she said. “About a year ago, I was like, ‘I was a robot, and the robot broke.’ I cried and cried.”

Witherspoon said she texted her friend, Tracee Ellis Ross, to help process it all: “It actually makes me feel very vulnerable sharing that with y’all, but I think it’s important,” Witherspoon said, as she teared up onstage. “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 work or being a mom or being a partner, but who is holding you together, you know? It’s really important to remember.”

Of Wade’s poem, Witherspoon said she “burst into tears” upon reading it “because I didn’t feel like I was taking very good care of myself, and I wasn’t asking other people for help.”

Witherspoon’s plate is enormously full: in addition to being a mother of three, she is an actress, a producer, a philanthropist, and the founder of media company Hello Sunshine, her clothing line, Draper James, and Reese’s Book Club. Now, she said, she wants to share her lessons learned so that hopefully the path will be easier for others that can learn from her struggles. “I feel like I’ve learned a lot,” she said. “Because I did the work—the hard work—in my early twenties 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 added “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.”