Sometimes life changes slowly. And sometimes something happens that shakes everything you thought you knew about yourself, your relationships and the life you thought you were going to have.

Hayden Panettiere calls these moments “life quakes” in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning—and after listening to her tell her own story, Erin couldn't stop thinking about the life quakes that shape all of us.

Erin dives into Hayden's deeply personal memoir and discovers far more connections to her own life than she expected. Hayden spent virtually her entire childhood performing, becoming famous before she was old enough to understand what fame meant. Her story moves through childhood fame, family turmoil, sexuality, motherhood, a traumatic delivery, postpartum anxiety, addiction, rehab, custody, abusive relationships and the complicated ways we sometimes try to survive feelings we don't know how to carry.

In this episode:

• The Lindsay Clancy trial and postpartum mental health
• Why appearing “fine” tells us very little about what's happening underneath
• Hayden growing up in Hollywood and never really knowing life without performing
• Childhood fame, identity and authenticity
• Sexuality and sharing the parts of ourselves we've kept hidden
• Family turmoil, divorce and why “a broken home is still a home”
• Erin's experience creating a new version of home for her boys after divorce
• Hayden's traumatic birth and postpartum experience
• Erin's anxiety after her newborn son was hospitalized with RSV
• Motherhood and the enormous pressure women can carry
• Alcohol, pills, addiction, rehab and attempts to quiet emotional pain
• Motherhood, custody and making painful decisions for your children
• Domestic violence and why leaving isn't always as simple as it looks from the outside
• Shame, survival and finally telling the parts of our stories we'd rather hide
• Why another woman's bravery can make us brave enough to tell our own truth
• “Life quakes” and the experiences that divide our lives into before and after
• Letting go of old versions of ourselves and moving toward a more aligned life

Our hardest experiences don't have to disappear for us to move forward. We can acknowledge the choices we're proud of, the ones we aren't, the things that happened to us and the things we wish we'd done differently—and decide what we're taking with us into the next version of our lives.

Sometimes someone else's bravery gives us permission to be brave too.

Life is short. And a life of alignment is priceless.

Submit listener questions or share your story as a possible pod guest at www.laylowpod.com

Thanks for laying low with me. ❤️

• How Erin and Janene met at work over 20 years ago, and how they found their way back to each other post-divorce

• Growing up Mormon in Utah County vs. being Mormon-adjacent — and why that distinction actually matters

• The embarrassing bishop's office story Erin has never told Janene before

• Janene's experience at 16 that taught her exactly how shame gets assigned in these communities

• What it felt like to move into a small town as a divorced mom and be treated like an outcast

• The real reason Janene believes pornography played a role in her marriage

• How "no" turned into pressure, turned into a threesome, turned into swinging
• Erin and Janene's genuinely different takes on porn — and why they can disagree without it becoming a fight
  

Erin and Janene don't wrap this one up with a bow — there's too much left to say, and they both know it. What they land on instead is the thing that's held their friendship together for two decades: telling the truth, even when it's messy, even when it doesn't make you look good.

Submit listener questions or share your story as a possible pod guest at www.laylowpod.com

Thanks for laying low with me. ❤️

This week on Lay Low, it's just Erin — sitting down to say some things she's needed to get off her chest for a long time. She's spent almost two decades in survival mode — financially, personally, in her work — and she's finally ready to leave that version of herself in the past.

Before diving in, Erin catches listeners up on the week it's been: eclipse season energy, football season, and a documentary she cannot stop thinking about. But the episode goes deeper, too. She opens up about where survival mode actually started — an investment that cost her family everything back when her kids were little, the divorce that followed, and the relationship after that where she finally saw a red flag she'd been missing for years. She talks about what she actually needs from a partner going forward, why hustle isn't the same thing as healing, and the small, intentional changes she's been making lately that are quietly adding up to something bigger.

This episode includes:

• Riding out eclipse-season energy instead of fighting it
• Forty-eight hours with her son Colt, a Zach Bryan concert, and the moment she wanted more of
• Where her survival mode really started — and the two decades it took her to notice
• The investment that set her first marriage back in a way she never fully recovered from
• The red flag she didn't see until it became the biggest lesson of her last relationship
• What she actually needs from a partner going forward
• Small, intentional changes: pink shoes, cutting a ten-hour-a-week habit, and leaving an office she's outgrown
• Why "more moments like this" might be the most powerful thing you say to yourself all year
• A challenge to shake up one thing in your routine this week
  

Maybe the version of herself that's been surviving for so long doesn't have to be the version she brings into what's next.

Submit listener questions or share your story as a possible pod guest at www.laylowpod.com

Thanks for laying low with me. ❤️