Shailene Woodley famous for her leading roles in The Fault in Our Stars, The Descendants and the Divergent series has good reasons for her strong passion in life.
“In my late teens, I had a strong idea of my identity and the meaning of my life, but then I went through an abusive relationship,”
‘’I was very, very sick in my early 20s. While I was doing the ‘Divergent’ movies and working hard, I also was struggling with a deeply personal, very scary physical situation,”
“Because of that, I said no to a lot of opportunities because I needed to get better, and those jobs ended up going to peers of mine who I love,”
“I was in a place where I had no choice but to just surrender and let go of my career, and it brought out this negative voice in my mind that kept spinning for years and years afterward,”
She struggled very hard during that period and questioned,
‘Am I going to survive what I’m going through right now and ever be healthy, or even have the opportunity to work on projects I’m passionate about again because of the situation I’m in?’’
“Now I’m on the other side of it, thank God. A lot of the last few years has been about focusing on mental health for me, and it’s a slow process,” Woodley said. “But because of that work, I feel very grounded and rooted in who I am and very clear about everything in my life, whether it’s my career or my relationships or my own internal worth. I feel very grateful to have walked that line of fire, because now I know what I don’t want to ever go back to.”
In the HBO series, Little Big Lies, Woodley plays a sexual assault survivor for which she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe award.
Woodley and her mother co-founded the All it Takes non-profit organization in 2010. All it Takes is a youth leadership program that aims to educate young people to practice empathy, compassion, responsibility, and purpose in hopes to foster sustainable, positive change for themselves, others and the environment. In July 2019, Woodley became an Oceans Ambassador for Greenpeace and embarked on a three-week-long expedition to the Sargasso Sea to study the impact of plastics and microplastics on marine life, and to document the importance of this unique ecosystem for protection under a new Global Ocean Treaty.
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