Sometimes, it’s those special kind of nights that make you grateful to hear about another’s personal, creative and very grounded journey of growing up that makes you reflect on your own.

Mandy Moore shared a heartwarming conversation about life, motherhood, growing up a teen pop star to navigating her career, a “normal” and fulfilling childhood, with her parents as her rock, a fulfilling marriage with her husband, and how music and acting and her creative pursuits intersect.

The things I took away was that Mandy decided from a young age that she “want[s] to be in it for the long haul. That is my definition of success: longevity.”

She points to childhood role models Bette Midler as one of her inspirations for “doing it right,” with music, family, theater, and a flourishing career.

Mandy shared that music has never been her day job, and that it’s always been a passion project for her, and very fulfilling in that way as she’s had other successes and opportunities to pay the bills (perhaps her film and television roles on This Is Us and earlier A Walk to Remember days).

“Music takes the backseat,” she says, and as she performed with husband Taylor of Dawes, I saw how extremely comforting, vulnerable, and at peace she was to just stand by him, sing a few songs she loves, and not have the attention entirely on her. With acting there comes roles to play and characters to step into, but performing music, she says, is so raw.

Most eye-opening for me was to hear how during Mandy’s late 20s to early 30s, she had reached a really dark place in her life. Her early teen career wasn’t a thing anymore, her filming slowed down, and she felt complete “emptiness, making myself as small as possible to accommodate everyone else” and she “couldn’t be myself in my late 20s” and thought her career was done.

“Maybe my creative run is over,” she remembers telling herself.

And then, at 31, Dan Fogelman, in that dark place, gave her a chance to find herself again and granted her permission to do the show This Is Us, and it changed everything.

Mandy reflected that artists are “all on our own islands” and it’s “very isolating. No one can understand it unless you’re going through it.”

On parenthood, she mentioned: “I’m having kinder conversations with myself, to myself” and that “it’s electric” and “changes everything.”

Thank you Mandy Moore and Sam Jones for the special night. And shout out to the two fans who recognized me from Instagram and decided to say hi (ha, chatting with them reminded me of my younger concert days and how much seeing your biggest inspirations really means to you; even though I was dead tired from working a nonstop schedule and almost didn’t make it, I’m grateful for these fans for pointing out how many times I’ve seen Mandy, from the first time I saw her and took a selfie at her Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, to the many intimate shows I’ve been able to see her perform).