Jada Pinkett-Smith pulled the curtain back on the ’bouts of depression’ and ‘despair’ she experienced around the time she turned 40 in 2011.
The wife of Will Smith confessed: ‘”On paper,” it all looked grand – I had the beautiful family, the superstar husband, the lavish lifestyle, fame and fortune.’
However, in her upcoming memoir Worthy, excerpted by People, she revealed that ‘I’d fallen into despair and wanted to be on this earth less and less.’
Her marriage to Will fell under blistering public scrutiny in 2020, when she interviewed him on her chat show Red Table Talk about an ‘entanglement’ she had four years earlier with a dramatically younger man.
The relationship became even more notorious last year when Will slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars for making a bald joke about Jada that visibly offended her.
Candor: In her memoir, Jada Pinkett-Smith pulled the curtain back on the ’bouts of depression ‘ and ‘despair’ she experienced around the time she turned 40; pictured at the book launch
A close family: Jada with Will Smith, their kids Jaden and Willow as well as Will’s son from his first marriage
Jada was the product of a tempestuous childhood in Baltimore, scarred by her mother’s heroin addiction and father’s alcoholism.
Against the backdrop of her turbulent home life, Jada grew to become a drug dealer herself by the time she met her friend Tupac Shakur in high school.
In her forthcoming autobiography, she wrote that she discovered during adulthood that she was suffering from ‘complex trauma with PTSD and dissociation.’
However, during her period of intense distress in the year of her 40th birthday, she had yet to receive an official diagnosis and was left twisting in the wind.
The excerpt begins with her driving through Ojai, California heading to a meeting with a mysterious ‘Medicine Woman’ she hopes will alleviate her issues.
‘Don’t be afraid, I tell myself. You are in peaceful, beautiful Ojai. Why are you so scared? Because, I answer right back, what if THIS actually kills me?’ she wrote.
Then, she added: ‘Three months earlier, in the wake of my fortieth birthday, my biggest worry was Well, what if it DOESN’T?’
Pulling back the veil of her glamorous public persona, Jada recalled: ‘For two decades, I had been putting on a good face, going with the flow, telling everyone I was okay. Yet underneath, bouts of depression and overwhelming hopelessness had smoldered until they turned into raging hellfire in my broken heart.
‘Unwelcome feelings – of not deserving love – made it harder to understand the disconnect between the so-called perfect life I had achieved and the well of loss I carried with me. Therapy helped up to a point. It got me to 40! But to what end?’
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