Actress and comedian Sarah Silverman has struggled with depression since she was a teenager.
CNN reports the 45-year-old actress has lived her life learning a lot of lessons all throughout. The I Smile Back actress shared a few tips to start the 2016 right. From embracing your body image to being vocal with your truths, the 2016 Screen Actor's Guild Award nominee knows exactly how to cope with the bad days and she's sharing it with everybody who is going through hell as well.
In her new movie, Silverman plays a mother who is struggling with depression. In one of the scenes, her character stares at the mirror as she lifts her arms to check how her breasts would look like. Silverman admitted to being insecure with her slender figure. To keep her feel at ease, her therapist advised her to do less of something that triggers insecurity: looking at the mirror.
"It really blew my mind in the greatest way," Silverman said. "And I just thought, 'oh, right.'"
"I always look at myself knowing that I will have a certain degree of cognitive distortion ... so I put it on a bell curve," she added. "I kind of adjust what I'm seeing and know that it's better than what I'm seeing, whether that's true or not."
As a comedian, the Saturday Night Live writer has also spoken about various social issues including the gender wage gap which she calls "vagina tax."
"Comedy has always played a big part in pop culture and the way we see history. It's more of a mirror to society and more of an honest reflection of history than history, sometimes," she told CNN. "If you look at all things that were at one time taboo and aren't anymore, the change is that it became a topic of discussion."
Among those topics is depression, which is often neglected and ignored by people who feel they're too strong to admit it. "Whatever is mentionable can be more manageable," Silverman quoted Mister Rogers.
"I remember thinking I want to move home to New Hampshire," she recalled. "You just want to go home, and you don't want to do anything scary. And then I found a woman who put me on a pill called Klonopin that all it does is block panic attacks. And that really saved my life in that I was able to go to work at 'Saturday Night Live' and exist through each day while I was figuring this out."
Silverman advises us to embrace the quiet moments, too. "The moments between the jokes, the setup, the punchline ... can be just as powerful and say just as much as words."
