Aniston: I Tried 'Everything' to Have a Baby

In 2016, Jennifer Aniston penned an op-ed describing the daily harassment she faced as journalists obsessed over whether or not she was pregnant. Mostly, she wrote about "the perpetuation of this notion that women are somehow incomplete, unsuccessful, or unhappy if they're not married with children." What she left out was that "I was trying to get pregnant," the actor tells Allure in December's cover story. As tabloids painted her as career-driven and selfish and suggested "the reason my husband [Justin Theroux] left me … was because I wouldn't give him a kid ... I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it," she continues. And "all the years and years and years of speculation ... it was really hard."

The 53-year-old is thankful to be on the other side. "I'd gone through really hard s--t, and if it wasn't for going through that, I would've never become who I was meant to be," she says. "That's why I have such gratitude for all those s----y things. Otherwise, I would've been stuck being this person that was so fearful, so nervous, so unsure of who they were." Though the baby-making ship has sailed, "I have zero regrets," she adds. "I don't have to think about that anymore." She learned to let go of resentment and anger from her mom, who Aniston says always carried the pain of her divorce. It's about "taking the darker things that happen in our lives, the not-so-happy moments, and trying to find places to honor them because of what they have given to us."

She likens her experience to getting "blown apart," then "put back together into this beautiful mosaic." "I have had to do personal work that was long overdue, parts of me that hadn't healed from the time I was a little kid," she continues. "I am a constant work in progress. Thank God. How uninteresting would life be if we all achieved enlightenment and that was it?" But "I feel the best in who I am today, better than I ever did in my 20s or 30s even, or my mid-40s," she adds. "I feel like I'm coming out of hibernation. I don't have anything to hide." She adds, "We needed to stop saying bad s--t to ourselves," referring to herself at the various stages of her life. She suggests others might want to take a break from social media, which she describes as a "torture." "It goes back to how young girls feel about themselves, compare and despair," she says. (More Jennifer Aniston stories.)