Sometimes life changes slowly. And sometimes something happens that shakes everything you thought you knew about yourself, your relationships and the life you thought you were going to have.

Hayden Panettiere calls these moments “life quakes” in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning—and after listening to her tell her own story, Erin couldn't stop thinking about the life quakes that shape all of us.

Erin dives into Hayden's deeply personal memoir and discovers far more connections to her own life than she expected. Hayden spent virtually her entire childhood performing, becoming famous before she was old enough to understand what fame meant. Her story moves through childhood fame, family turmoil, sexuality, motherhood, a traumatic delivery, postpartum anxiety, addiction, rehab, custody, abusive relationships and the complicated ways we sometimes try to survive feelings we don't know how to carry.

In this episode:

• The Lindsay Clancy trial and postpartum mental health
• Why appearing “fine” tells us very little about what's happening underneath
• Hayden growing up in Hollywood and never really knowing life without performing
• Childhood fame, identity and authenticity
• Sexuality and sharing the parts of ourselves we've kept hidden
• Family turmoil, divorce and why “a broken home is still a home”
• Erin's experience creating a new version of home for her boys after divorce
• Hayden's traumatic birth and postpartum experience
• Erin's anxiety after her newborn son was hospitalized with RSV
• Motherhood and the enormous pressure women can carry
• Alcohol, pills, addiction, rehab and attempts to quiet emotional pain
• Motherhood, custody and making painful decisions for your children
• Domestic violence and why leaving isn't always as simple as it looks from the outside
• Shame, survival and finally telling the parts of our stories we'd rather hide
• Why another woman's bravery can make us brave enough to tell our own truth
• “Life quakes” and the experiences that divide our lives into before and after
• Letting go of old versions of ourselves and moving toward a more aligned life

Our hardest experiences don't have to disappear for us to move forward. We can acknowledge the choices we're proud of, the ones we aren't, the things that happened to us and the things we wish we'd done differently—and decide what we're taking with us into the next version of our lives.

Sometimes someone else's bravery gives us permission to be brave too.

Life is short. And a life of alignment is priceless.

Submit listener questions or share your story as a possible pod guest at www.laylowpod.com

Thanks for laying low with me. ❤️