Jodie FosterJodie Foster has revealed life as a child star was lonely and she’s still not sure what she wants to do with her life.

The Panic Room star has acted for 42 of her 45 years and told Parade magazine recently that it’s hard to compare her life to what it might have been: “People ask me if I missed anything by not having a normal childhood. The truth is, if I’d been an ambassador’s daughter or grown up on a farm in Missouri, I wouldn’t have had a normal childhood either. I had the only childhood I knew.”

“Being a child prodigy is inherently lonely. I was one of them. You’re different from other kids. No one else can understand. There’s a longing to connect, a craving to say, ‘Here is the deepest part of me, the part that people don’t see.’”

“To me, acting didn’t seem like much of a profession. My mom always said, ‘By the time you’re 16, your career will be over. So what do you want to do then?’ She was correct. Most child actors’ careers end early. They’re lost.”

“I’ve been working for 42 years. Sometimes I think, ‘What the hell are you doing? What’s the value of all this?’ I have fantasies about the things I might have done. I wish I’d been a ski bum or maybe had a job at a Starbucks in a ski place.”

In her early 20s, she decided to take a break from Hollywood and studied literature at Yale, graduating magna cum laude in 1985, and thought that might turn her life around: “I saw leaving college as an opportunity to do something different with my life.”

“I always thought that becoming an academic was going to be my path. I could’ve gone to New York, but I went back to Los Angeles because it was where I was from.”

“I’m still not sure where I’m going in my life. There are times when I don’t really know what I am here for.”

“When I had my kids, I was burnt out on the film business again and wondering if this new identity as a parent was going to be fulfilling enough. I was forced to ask these really hard questions about myself: Is being a mother everything? Are you supposed to lose yourself in the process of being a mother?”

“A parent’s love for her children is unconditional [but] I don’t think the reverse is true. In some ways, my mother’s life was given meaning through me. She didn’t have my opportunities. I had to take care of her, and that pretty much meant I had to wake up and go to work.”