A soft-spoken teen touched Jennifer Aniston’s heart over the weekend.
The actress was in Italy on Saturday at the Giffoni Film Festival to receive a lifetime achievement award, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Giffoni is one of Europe’s largest film festivals for children and teens. One young person in particular reportedly moved Aniston to tears.
During a question and answer session, a young woman asked the former “Friends” star if she has ever experienced waking up in the morning and not knowing who she was.
The star wiped her eyes as she told the audience, “There are not enough fingers and toes in this entire room to count how many times that moment has happened to me.”
“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,” Aniston said. “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.’ “
Aniston said she is not the only celebrity to feel that way.
“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 added. “There’s nothing that separates us from you, because we all started at the same place. We all came out of nowhere.”
Aniston had some advice for those in attendance.
“Don’t punish yourself if you feel that,” she said. “Go talk to people and seek help and always find something to inspire you.”
The star who recently wrote an essay blasting the media for what she said was objectifying women also told the young crowd that “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 brakes,” she said. “That’s why we’re not seeing the right stories being told, because everyone is stuck in their phones.”
