The DSM-5 lists sudden weight change, feelings of worthlessness or guilt, sleep disturbances, and a loss of interest or pleasure among the criteria for diagnosing clinical depression. For Shailene Woodley, all it takes to tell is one look at a tree.
“I knew I was depressed when I looked at a tree and felt nothing,” she said in an interview with Outside magazine published Tuesday in honor of the publication selecting her as their Outsider of the Year. “That was the lowest low of my life.”
The actor was seemingly referring to the aftermath of her 2022 breakup with fiancé Aaron Rodgers, unless some other thing happened that would make her tell the magazine that her low came after she had “a really awful, traumatic thing happen in early 2022.”
“I felt like I lost my soul, my self, my happiness, my joy,” she said of the incident. “I really understood depression and anxiety and, like, complete soul detachment.”
She also, apparently, lost some of her camping equipment in the split: “I had to stop at REI and get a new sleeping pad,” she said during the interview, which revolved around a night of camping and a photo shoot. “I left my old one with my ex.”
The person who styled that shoot, Woodley’s friend Kris Zero, is also the person Woodley credits with pulling her out of the dumps, occasionally by dealing with…literal dumps.
“Sometimes I was so angry at her,” Woodley said of Zero, who she said woke her up by blasting music pretty much every day for six months after the split. “But then we’d go surf, and for ten minutes that day I thought life could be OK again. Then the depression would come back and she’d go, ‘We’re volunteering at the horse ranch!’ And we’d find a random fucking horse ranch, and we’d clean up horse shit. We’d clean hooves and brush the horses, and for 20 minutes that day I thought life could be OK again. And then the depression came back and she’d wake me up the next morning and go, ‘Let’s go on a hike and bring trash bags and clean up trash!’”
Of course, it takes more than just one woman and manual labor involving equine dookie to lift a depression—Woodley also had Three Women, the Showtime series she co-starred in alongside Betty Gilpin, DeWanda Wise, and Gabrielle Creevey and which aired earlier this year. In January 2023, Woodley told Net-A-Porter that she released some of her feelings around her heartbreak on set.
“Three Women feels like it matters a lot—mostly, I think, because it mattered so much to me,” she said. “I feel honored to be a part of it, because it genuinely gave me a North Star in a time in my life when my compass…calibration did not exist.”
“It was hard to film because I was going through the darkest, hardest time in my life; it was winter in New York, and my personal life was shit, so it felt like a big pain bubble for eight months,” she said. “I was so grateful that at least I could go to work and cry and process my emotions through my character.”
