I'M STRONGER THAN EVER

In an emotional and revealing conversation, Reese Witherspoon opens up about surviving a very painful year

Work had always been her salvation. “I’m a person who fills my schedule with busyness so that I feel less alone or less nervous or less unsettled,” a tearful Reese Witherspoon confessed during an on stage chat with her pal, Tracee Ellis Ross, at Hello Sunshine’s Shine Away event in LA on Oct. 21. “About a year ago, I started to realize that isn’t going to work for me. I was a robot, and the robot broke. I cried and cried. It actually makes me feel very vulnerable sharing that with y’all, but it’s important…. 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?”

She had secretly fallen apart. “I didn’t feel like I was taking very good care of myself,” admits Reese, who went through a painful divorce from Jim Toth, her husband of nearly 12 years, in March and was named Forbes’ wealthiest self-made female actor in the world two months later. (She’d sold a stake in Hello Sunshine for nearly $1 billion in 2021.) “And I wasn’t asking other people for help.”

It wasn’t until she finally did — by reaching out to her tight circle of friends and calling on years of therapy and self-help lessons —that Reese finally put herself back together. “This was the worst year of her life,” says a source. “But she survived and came out of it stronger than ever.”

FIXING WHAT’S BROKEN