Michelle Stafford yr phyllis hw
Credit: Howard Wise/JPI

The Emmy winner opened up on Instagram… and then thought better of it.

On January 9, Michelle Stafford grew reflective and shared her feelings on social media. “I posted something earlier about how my babies are growing up,” she wrote later, “and I’m sad and blah, blah, blah…

“I deleted,” she continued. “You don’t need to hear that crap from me.”

More: Michelle Stafford questions her own swimsuit pic

The Young & Restless leading lady wasn’t invalidating her feelings about the passage of time or the fact that real-life kids like her own Natalia and Jameson can seem to mature as fast as TV youngsters with soap-opera rapid-aging syndrome. It was just…

Let’s let her explain.

“So many in the world are way sadder [than me] these days — for good reason,” said the Emmy winner, who’s played Phyllis off and on since 1994. As for her blue mood, “it was a moment — forgive me.”

Not sure forgiveness is really necessary; we’re all allowed to have moments, good, bad and in between ones. In any case, Stafford replaced her original post with a shot from “my six-feet-apart work lunch with the beautiful Tracey E. Bregman (Lauren) and always dapper Christian Jules LeBlanc (Michael).

“We bought food and found a real lovely, comfortable, romantic, iron and cement stairwell to eat on, as all sitting areas have been taken away in L.A.,” she continued. “We are creatives. We’ll make any area shine! Nothing will keep us down.”

More: 10-step plan to make Y&R must-see TV

In closing, the Emmy winner issued words of an encouragement that also worked as a challenge that’s more than worth rising to meet: “Let’s continue to make this year shine, y’all!”

 

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While you’re here, why not peruse the below photo gallery, which counts down daytime’s 10 most formidable femmes fatales ever. Needless to say, Phyllis is among them. But — did she get the No. 1 spot?