Claire Foy’s life with anxiety
Another star of stage and screen has opened up about her troubles. In an interview with freelance writer Tom Lamont for The Guardian, actress Claire Foy explains her struggles with anxiety.
Her condition is not new. Now 34, she has experienced anxiety since childhood. Despite the acclaim and awards, she says she has been plagued by self-doubt and negative thoughts and underestimated her ability. “When you have anxiety, you have anxiety about – I don’t know – crossing the road,” she explains.
But the spotlight that has come with bravura performances, such as her turn as Queen Elizabeth II in the Netflix series “The Crown” and as the antihero Lisbeth Salander in soon-to-be-released “The Girl in the Spider’s Web,” ratcheted up her anxiety.
“The thing about it is, it’s not related to anything that would seem logical. It’s purely about that feeling in the pit of your stomach, and the feeling that you can’t, because you’re ‘this’ or you’re ‘that.’ It’s my mind working at a thousand beats a second and running away with a thought.”
She is currently on hiatus; daily life right now revolves around her daughter. Anxiety remains a part of the day, although time and therapy are easing the burden. “It’s still there, but I guess I don’t believe it so much anymore. I used to think that this was my lot in life, to be anxious,” she said in the interview. “And that I would struggle and struggle and struggle with it, and that it would make me quite miserable, and that I’d always be restricted.”
“But now I’m able to disassociate myself from it more. I know that it’s just something I have – and that I can take care of myself.”
Padma Lakshmi speaks out about rape
Author, cook, TV host, and producer Padma Lakshmi is another celebrity with a seemingly glittering life. But, like Mr. Alda and Ms. Foy, there is darkness. In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times and as reported by Maura Hohman of People magazine, she described being raped at age 16 by her then-boyfriend.
“When we went out, he would park the car and come in and sit on our couch and talk to my mother. He never brought me home late on a school night. We were intimate to a point, but he knew that I was a virgin and that I was unsure of when I would be ready to have sex,” Ms. Lakshmi explains.
“On New Year’s Eve, just a few months after we first started dating, he raped me.”
Ms. Lakshmi says she felt it was her fault at the time. “We had no language in the 1980s for date rape,” she wrote in the opinion piece. Flash ahead to the present and she understands well the current climate around this #WhyIDidn’tReport moment. “I understand why both women would keep this information to themselves for so many years, without involving the police. For years, I did the same thing.”
Her story has inspired victims to come forward with their experiences and, in one case, for an attacker to apologize for his actions.