Jada Pinkett Smith, the 52-year-old actress – who is married to Hollywood star Will Smith – has revealed that she experienced “overwhelming” feelings of “hopelessness” around her 40th birthday.
“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,” Pinkett shared in her new book Worthy. “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 forty! But to what end?” Jada admits that she was a “chronic mess” at one point in time.
The Hollywood star also described her kids as her “only motivation” to keep going. Jada – who has Jaden, 25, and Willow, 22, with Will, is also the stepmother of Trey, her husband’s son from a previous marriage. “I would later be diagnosed and informed that I suffer from complex trauma with PTSD and dissociation, but without this guidepost, I was a chronic mess with no fix, no possibility to heal,” she said.
“Every morning, waking up was like walking the plank of doom – could I make it to 4pm? If I could, I had survived the day. I always wanted to sleep, but I never slept well. My children could put a smile on my face and were my only motivation to keep me going, but more and more, I could feel myself losing my grip of connection to them.”
