Jodie Sweetin is having the time of her life on Dancing With the Stars, but the 34-year-old actress got emotional during the show on Monday, April 4.
Dancing in the competition’s famous “Most Memorable Year” week, Sweetin used the opportunity to talk about her amazing comeback and also to get real about some of the struggles she’s had in the past.
“My most memorable year has been this past year of my life,” Sweetin revealed to her dance partner, Keo Motsepe. “Getting to step back in and find my dreams and the thing that I love again.”
She then went on to bare her soul about the “dark place” she found herself in when Full House wrapped in 1995.
“It was a huge shift in my life. Everything I had known from the time I was 5 years old suddenly ended and it was like saying goodbye to a family I had loved very, very much,” Sweetin said. “At such a young age it really was a huge loss for me, I didn’t know how to grieve.”
“Drugs and alcohol just sort of numbed everything,” she went on. “I was doing cocaine and ecstasy and alcohol and all of that. The darkest moments for me weren’t necessarily winding up in the hospital or anything like that. It was those quiet moments alone when I just hated the person I had become.”
As Sweetin discussed exclusively in the current issue of Us Weekly, she’s now been sober for five years, and couldn’t be living a better life with her two kids Zoie, 7, and Beatrix, 5, and her loving fiancé, Justin Hodak.
Her Fuller House costar Bob Saget also made a video appearance on the hit dance show to show the respect he feels for his friend.
“She’s a great mom because she’s been through so much, and with that comes honesty, and the more honest you are with your kids the more you can be real with them,” Saget shared, visibly moved by the conversation. “I think her biggest accomplishment is that she’s just incredibly real. And that’s one of the things I love the most about her.”
And if we weren’t feeling emotional enough as it was, Sweetin shared a story about her mother and how she’s felt, watching her daughter’s difficult journey.
“I remember my mom saying that when I was little, I had this light that shined really big, and that she had watched my light become very dark,” Sweetin said. “And I just remember my mom saying to me, ‘Your light shines again.’ So, through doing this dance, I get to shine again.”
“I dimmed my light for a long time,” she added. “And I don’t feel I have to do that anymore.”
Watch part of Sweetin’s emotionally charged foxtrot in the video above.
