+
upworthy
Pop Culture

Rachel McAdams recalls taking a major break from acting at the height of fame to 'stay sane'

"It's taken years to understand what I intuitively was doing."

rachel mcadams
Lionsgate Movies/Youtube

Rachel McAdams in "Are You There God? It's me, Margaret"

Rachel McAdams gave us two iconic roles back in the early 2000s with “Mean Girls” and the “Notebook.” And though she went on to star in other movies, her career certainly didn’t follow the normal trajectory of other Hollywood “It” girls—featuring in blockbuster after blockbuster until the well runs dry. In fact, there’s a cumulative two years where the actress didn’t appear in anything.

According to McAdams, this break was a form of self-care.

In a recent interview with Bustle, McAdams revealed that somewhat overnight success quickly forced her to evaluate her personal boundaries, recalling a Vanity Fair photoshoot in which she ultimately walked out after learning that she was expected to pose nude.

From that moment, the A-lister decided to move away from the spotlight, literally. She went back home to Canada to focus on raising her family, turning down major roles in films like “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Casino Royale,” “Mission: Impossible III,” “Iron Man” and “Get Smart.”

Of course, knowing her decision was the right one didn’t make things any easier. She told Bustle, “I felt guilty for not capitalizing on the opportunity that I was being given, because I knew I was in such a lucky spot.”

“There were definitely some anxious moments of wondering if I was just throwing it all away, and why was I doing that?” she added.

At the same time, she also knew that her current path wasn’t quite what she “needed to stay sane.” So, she chose sanity.

It’s been years since that leap of faith, and now McAdams is making her career comeback by starring in the highly anticipated book adaptation of Judy Blume’s “Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?” And this time, after cultivating a rich personal life, she’s more self-assured than ever, sharing that the break helped her feel “empowered.”

“It helped me feel like I was taking back some control. And I think it sort of allowed me to come in from a different doorway,” she said.

We might not all be Hollywood A-listers like Rachel McAdams, but her story feels universal nonetheless. Most of us, at one point or another, have experienced the pressure of choosing between material success and mental health. In reality, the two are inexorably linked, with our well-being providing the focus, confidence and stamina needed to truly accomplish something and sustain any momentum that follows. We know this on a gut level, and now more and more success stories are coming in that reflect this wisdom. Hustle culture certainly isn’t dead by any means, but its siren call is becoming steadily fainter. And if its silence means more empowerment, that feels like the biggest success of all.

By the way, if you haven’t checked out McAdams in the new trailer for “Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?” then do yourself a favor and watch below. Without a doubt, it marks the beginning of a career renaissance.

Community

How to end hunger, according to the people who face it daily

Here’s what people facing food insecurity want you to know about solving the hunger problem in America

True

Even though America is the world’s wealthiest nation, about 1 in 6 of our neighbors turned to food banks and community programs in order to feed themselves and their families last year. Think about it: More than 9 million children faced hunger in 2021 (1 in 8 children).

In order to solve a problem, we must first understand it. Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization, released its second annual Elevating Voices: Insights Report and turned to the experts—people experiencing hunger—to find out how this issue can be solved once and for all.

Here are the four most important things people facing hunger want you to know.

Keep ReadingShow less
Pets

Family brings home the wrong dog from daycare until their cats saved the day

A quick trip to the vet confirmed the cats' and family's suspicions.

Family accidentally brings wrong dog home but their cats knew

It's not a secret that nearly all golden retrievers are identical. Honestly, magic has to be involved for owners to know which one belongs to them when more than one golden retriever is around. Seriously, how do they all seem have the same face? It's like someone fell asleep on the copy machine when they were being created.

Outside of collars, harnesses and bandanas, immediately identifying the dog that belongs to you has to be a secret skill because at first glance, their personalities are also super similar. That's why it's not surprising when one family dropped off their sweet golden pooch at daycare and to be groomed, they didn't notice the daycare sent out the wrong dog.

See, not even their human parents can tell them apart because when the swapped dog got home, nothing seemed odd to the owners at first. She was freshly groomed so any small differences were quickly brushed off. But this accidental doppelgänger wasn't fooling her feline siblings.

Keep ReadingShow less
Photo via Canva, @WhattheADHD/Twitter

The 'bionic reading' font is designed to help keep you focused and read faster.

Reading is a fundamental tool of learning for most people, which is why it's one of the first things kids learn in school and why nations set literacy goals.

But even those of us who are able to read fluently might sometimes struggle with the act of reading itself. Perhaps we don't read as quickly as we wish we could or maybe our minds wander as our eyes move across the words. Sometimes we get to the end of a paragraph and realize we didn't retain anything we just read.

People with focus or attention issues can struggle with reading, despite having no actual reading disabilities. It can be extremely frustrating to want to read something and have no issues with understanding the material, yet be unable to keep your mind engaged with the text long enough to get "into" what you're reading.

Keep ReadingShow less

A guy passes out on his bed eating pizza.

A 29-year-old woman had a baby girl, and after a brief maternity leave, she had to return to work. She couldn't afford childcare, so her husband, 35, reluctantly agreed to watch the baby while she was at work.

“It’s important to know that he’s been unemployed since 2021,” the woman wrote on Reddit’s AITA subforum. “He receives benefits. It’s also important to know that he’s extremely lazy. He doesn’t cook, clean, or help out in any way. I was nervous about leaving her home with her father, but I had no choice.”

The mother had reason to be worried about leaving her baby home alone with her husband, but in the beginning, things seemed fine. “When I came back from work, she was clean and sleeping. The next few times I came home, he was either playing with her, feeding her, or out for a walk with her. I was happy,” she wrote.

Keep ReadingShow less

Only child asks her friends what it's like to grow up with siblings.

Ahhh, siblings. Sometimes they're your best friends and other times your living room turns into an MMA octagon over the remote control. If you grew up with brothers and sisters, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to be an only child. (That's not to say you didn't dream about it when your sister stole your favorite shirt for the 30th time.)

But not everyone has siblings, so it can be equally as hard for someone who grew up as an only child to picture what it would be like to have them. Only children also likely had moments where they dreamt of having a little brother or sister, not realizing the literal torment siblings can inflict on each other.

TikTok creator Lonnie IIV recently posted a video of himself with two other friends seemingly out to lunch, when the girl in the group asked what it was like to grow up with siblings. In less than a minute she realized she lucked out being an only child because her two guy friends gave her a crash course in sibling behavior.

Keep ReadingShow less
Photo: courtesy BioCarbon Engineering/WikiCommons

Technology is the single greatest contributor to climate change but it may also soon be used to offset the damage we've done to our planet since the Industrial Age began.

In September 2018, a project in Myanmar used drones to fire "seed missiles" into remote areas of the country where trees were not growing. Less than a year later, thousands of those seed missiles have sprouted into 20-inch mangrove saplings that could literally be a case study in how technology can be used to innovate our way out of the climate change crisis.

Keep ReadingShow less
Health

Artists got fed up with these 'anti-homeless spikes.' So they made them a bit more ... comfy.

"Our moral compass is skewed if we think things like this are acceptable."

Photo courtesy of CC BY-ND, Immo Klink and Marco Godoy

Spikes line the concrete to prevent sleeping.


These are called "anti-homeless spikes." They're about as friendly as they sound.

As you may have guessed, they're intended to deter people who are homeless from sitting or sleeping on that concrete step. And yeah, they're pretty awful.

The spikes are a prime example of how cities design spaces to keep homeless people away.

Keep ReadingShow less