Jennifer Aniston is sick of pretending at this point.
Does it bother her that tabloids constantly run cover stories that purport to display her baby bump?
That she is faced with questions over an alleged pregnancy every other week?
Yes, it sure does.
And Aniston finally went off on the celebrity gossip culture earlier this week, especially the way it treats and depicts women.
She was roundly praised for her essay on the subject in The Huffington Post.
Then, over the weekend, Aniston was brought to tears by a young jury member at the 46th Annual Giffoni Film Festival, which took part on Italy’s Amalfi Coast.
The girl was among a group of young folks from around the globe brought to judge the annual youth festival.
She asked the former Friends star if she ever woke up in the morning and questioned who she was, which prompted tears to well up in Aniston’s eyes and for her to answer as follows.
“Yes, that moment has happened to me. There’s not enough fingers and toes in this entire room to count how many times that moment has happened.”
Pretty honest, us?
Stars. We guess they really are just like us, after all.
Added Aniston in response to the juror’s profound question:
“We’re all human beings at the end of the day, whether we’re a waitress or we’re a baker or we’re a student – whatever we are, at the end of the day, you can kind of hit walls and think:
‘I 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?’ or, ‘Will I survive?’
“And you just have to sort of, somehow, miraculously overcome. You just go, ‘I can.’ Yes, you can.”
Aniston was honored at the event with the film festival’s lifetime achievement award.
She took questions from the large group of children that touched on such topics as being a woman in Hollywood and what life is like for an actress of her stature.
“Know that your actors, your idols, your icons – whatever you call them – have all had that experience or that moment in their lives, many many times,” she said in reference to personal insecurities.
This is the case even for those with an awesome husband and support system.
“There’s nothing that separates us from you because we all started at the same place,” she said. “We all came out of nowhere… don’t punish yourself, if you feel that.”
