“Little House on the Prairie” star Melissa Gilbert recently discussed why she fled from Hollywood over a decade ago. In recent years, many celebrities have joined normal civilians in fleeing California, seeking a change of pace. The 60-year-old actress, who played Laura Ingalls Wilder in the famous show, explained how she grew tired of how Hollywood was impacting her life.
Gilbert shed light on the intense pressure of living in Los Angeles. “All of the pressures, I faced all of them,” she noted in an interview with People. “When you live in Los Angeles, it’s like living at the mall when you work at the mall. Literally, everyone is in the business. When you walk into a restaurant, every head turns to see who walked in.”
The actress further illustrated how the Hollywood mentality creates an incentive to always keep up with the Joneses, so to speak. “Everybody’s always looking, curious, competing and that’s a really difficult thing, especially for a female actor. It puts a lot of pressure on staying thin and staying young, and really it makes it hard to feel comfortable in one’s own skin, because [of] the aging process,” she continued.
“No matter how much we push it downstream, it’s inevitable,” Gilbert continued, explaining the unrealistic aversion to aging among Hollywood celebrities. “So are you going to age comfortably and happily? Are you going to fight it, be unhealthy and feel like there’s something wrong with you for aging and that you’re defective because you’ve gotten older?”
However, when Gilbert removed herself from the intense Hollywood environment she felt that she was able to breathe and liver her life more authentically. “I had to get out of there [L.A.], because it felt like I was not being authentically myself,” she said. “In the five years that I was in Michigan, all of that stopped. … I stopped everything and just focused on being as physically and emotionally healthy as I could. And I think that shows, ‘Yes, I’m aging, but it’s not a curse — it’s a blessing.’”
The American Tribune recently reported on similar commentary from fitness celebrity and entrepreneur, Jillian Michaels, who explained why she fled California. According to Michaels, she felt compelled to pack up and move out of her home state because California “got too crazy” for her.
She said, “I grew up here. I’m a woman. I’m a gay woman. My mom’s a Jew. My dad’s an Arab. I have a black kid, and believe it or not, my son is half Latin, even though he doesn’t look like it. I hold a million cards in your game of woke victimology poker, and when I leave California, maybe you’ve lost your mind, just maybe Liga when you when you have me running from home, maybe it’s gone way too far.”
“And you know, I actually take this, this line from Bill and Elon Musk, and they’re like, I actually haven’t changed. The world around me is shifting and I haven’t moved. So some of these laws that are passing here are absolutely mind-boggling in relation to crime, protecting our kids, we’re decriminalizing everything, which arguably, I would probably be okay with, but we’re not regulating any of it,” she added.
Featured image credit: NBC Television Network, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Little_House_on_the_Prairie_Melissa_Gilbert_1975_Crop_1.jpg
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