Keira Knightley reminds us that the 20-something struggle is real (and it’s going to be OK)

Your 20s are no joke. Or, as Keira Knightley bluntly/awesomely put it in her recent interview with Elle, her “twenties were crap.” Keira, we HEAR you.

One of the things Knightley struggled with the most during this tumultuous decade was dealing with social anxiety (again, hearing you/feeling you Keira).

“As a person, you’re changing so much and you’re trying to figure stuff out. Some people go wild and have a great time and throw caution to the wind, and I was the complete opposite. I was very shy. It took me a lot of years to try and stop pleasing a lot of people and allow myself to have fun.”

And she goes on, dropping more honesty and wisdom like a quarter-life guru.

“It’s the difficult thing of getting out of your own head. To stop going, ‘Oh, there’s something I should be doing, there’s a way I should be behaving, I should be dressing….’ All of those shoulds, you can drown in them.”

So how did Knightley deal with this rough period of time? She got into therapy, and makes a great pitch for seeking treatment in her interview.

“I’ve totally done therapy. I highly recommend it. In my early twenties when I found everything completely overwhelming, 100 percent, I did it! I think when you’re in those moments in your life, and you want to get through them, you have to do whatever it is to help you get over it. You have to give it a go. Try anything that might help.”

There’s certainly a lot less stigma surrounding the act of seeking therapy than there used to be, but real talk, the stigma is still a little bit there. What people need to know is that therapy is for anyone who wants perspective, who wants to work on themselves, who wants to figure out their ish and be better people. (If your insurance doesn’t cover treatment, there are community resources and practices with sliding scale fees). A great way to de-stigmatize something that gets a not-so-great rap is to have people who are in positions of power advocating for whatever that thing is, so in this case, Knightley going to bat for therapy. We’re so glad she shared her positive experience with treatment, and we hope that her words encourage those who would like some help to go seek it.

We’re also glad she opened up about her personal experience with quarter-life anxieties— she is proof that even super-famous people grapple with those same internal struggles. How do you get out of your own head, how do you know if your life is moving in the right direction and will the panic ever dissipate?

For Keira, a newfound confidence—particularly about her body—came this year, at age 30, when she had her daughter, Edie. “You go through pregnancy and labor and then feeding the kid and you go, ‘Wow, my body is totally amazing, and I’m never going to not like it again, because it did this, and this is f—g extraordinary,” she told Elle.

Now that’s some major wisdom. Happy 30s, Keira.

Related:

Lessons I’ve learned from going to therapy

A therapist shares what REALLY happens in therapy

Image via Sycamore Pictures