Jane Fonda wants young people trying to figure things out right now to know: It gets easier. The 85-year-old activist recently talked about the benefits of aging in the first episode of fellow actor Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s new podcast, Wiser Than Me, in which Fonda shared some insights she wished she’d known when she was younger. Specifically, she wants young people to know that she gets that it’s tough, but that it won’t always be that way.
“It’s really, really hard to be young. People always think it’s hard to be old. No, it’s hard to be young,” Fonda told her host.
“Amen. I couldn’t agree more. [Being young] is so hard,” Louis-Dreyfus, 62, replied.
Fonda said she’s determined not to gatekeep this message: “I, personally, think that it’s important to let young people know, ‘It’s not you, honey. It’s just really hard.’” (As a 28-year-old who spends the majority of her days wondering what the hell is going on just in general, I found this immensely heartening.)
One reason being young was challenging for her, Fonda said, is that she refused to lean on others. “I was brought up to never ask for advice or help, and I erroneously thought that that was the way you were supposed to be if you were a grownup,” she said. “Until I was 60, I never asked for advice—that seemed to be a weakness.”
Around the time that she realized how essential it was to reach out, Fonda also learned the importance of getting to know yourself, she said. “You can’t really know how to go forward if you don’t know where you’ve been,” she explained. “So I spent the year between 59 and 60 researching myself very objectively, like it wasn’t really me, it was somebody else.”
The result? Fonda learned what the rest of us have always known about her: “What I discovered was that I’m really brave,” she said. “I didn’t know that before. I’ve been brave all my life.”
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