Here's some of what she said:
Gwyneth, by her own admission, likes to do things "right". She is also a raging perfectionist. "It's why I'm not a great delegator. Sometimes I think I'm going to have to check myself into a mental asylum, it gets so bad," she shrugs only half-jokingly. "It's my worst quality, and I hate myself for it. It's like, what's wrong with you? Relax! Sometimes I feel like the psycho in Sleeping With the Enemy. Remember that film, when she's got to line up all the apricot chutneys just so? I think I'm scared of something, like there's something I need to figure out. I think I need to ask Goop about perfectionism, or go back to the shrink and figure out what's going on with that. I had a great therapist in New York, whom I still talk to. I don't yet have a great one here..."
That bad, huh? Is that why she's so very good at playing depressed? (Think Sylvia, Proof.) "Well, I just found out my grandmother's mother was a manic depressive," she says. "Apparently, she couldn't get out of bed, she couldn't feed the children. Well, I totally recognise that." Gwyneth is talking of her bout with post-natal depression after giving birth to Moses in 2006. It was a very different experience to when she had Apple, when she spent the first blissful one-and-a-half years of the baby's life virtually nannyless because she took to motherhood. "At my lowest, I was a robot. I just didn't feel anything. I had no maternal feelings for him – it was awful. I had no thoughts of harming him, thank God, but I couldn't connect, and still, when I look at pictures of him at three months old, I don't remember that time.
"My problem was that I never acknowledged anything was wrong. You know when before you get your period and you're about to kill? It's only after you get through it that you go, 'Aha, that's what it was.' Well, that's what it was like. I didn't put two and two together. I just carried on as normal, and I just felt crazy. It was Chris, actually, who said out loud that something was wrong. And that was such a relief when he did, because it was confirmation that it wasn't just me.
That was the beginning. That was when I cracked it – I started exercising and I started thinking about working again. That's my problem though.
Sometimes I have a hard time saying what I need to say. I'll be annoyed, I'll stew, I'll build a wall around me and give off the silent treatment – and I know that's not healthy. Passive aggression, see? Slowly, I'm getting better, but I don't think I've found that voice yet, to say how I really feel."
Do you ever get like that? I sure do. And I really wish I knew how to stop it - self-awareness can take you only so far, sometimes. Goop? (The apricot chutney thing is kinda weird though...) ;o)
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