Dear Gwyneth,

I know everyone’s been giving you a hard time lately for saying in your recent E! interview that 9-5 moms have it easier than you movie stars because “when you have an office job . . .it’s routine and, you know, you can do all the stuff in the morning and then you come home in the evening.” You think your life is so much harder because “when you’re shooting a movie, they’re like, ‘We need you to go to Wisconsin for two weeks,’ and then you work 14 hours a day and that part of it is very difficult. I think to have a regular job and be a mom is not as, of course there are challenges, but it’s not like being on set.”

Like working mom Mackenzie Dawson, who skewered you in her NY Post “Open Letter to Gwyneth,” I found your comments utterly out of touch with life outside the rarified bubble of Planet Hollywood. You might as well have said, “Like, let them eat cake.”

But after I picked up my jaw off the floor, I switched to professional mode and tried to see things from your perspective. And I realized you’ve taught us all a very important lesson.

When you’re unhappy, it’s easy to imagine how much better your life would be if only you were [fill in the blank] . . . single, married, younger, older, thinner, prettier, richer, or—hard as it might be for most of us to believe—poorer and more ordinary. Your fantasy of what life as an office worker would be like should remind us that when we think the grass would be greener, we haven’t got a clue.

I can’t, of course, surmise your mental condition just by reading the statement you made on your website Goop about your split with husband Chris Martin. But no matter how you try to spin it—by calling it “conscious uncoupling” instead of divorce, say—ending a 10-year marriage and working out the logistics of coparenting when you have young kids can’t be easy, even for a celebrity.

So, Gwyneth, here’s my unsolicited advice to you: find yourself a good cognitive-behavioral therapist to help you challenge your distorted thinking. And, while you’re at it, you might consider hiring a new publicist.

Sincerely,

Lynne S. Gots, PhD