Jada Pinkett Smith has revealed she “wanted to be on this earth less and less” while battling severe depression.
The wife, mom and actress opens up about her personal struggles in an excerpt recently published by People of her new memoir Worthy.
“For two decades, I had been putting on a good face, going with the flow, telling everyone I was okay,” she shares. “Yet underneath, bouts of depression and overwhelming hopelessness had smoldered until they turned into raging hellfire in my broken heart.”
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Pinkett Smith, 52, says when she turned 40, she “wanted to be on this earth less and less,” even though she has a “beautiful family” and lives a “lavish lifestyle.”
She says on the outside her life looked “perfect,” but inside, she carried a sense of “loss.”
“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,” she shares. “Therapy helped up to a point. It got me to forty! But to what end?”
Pinkett Smith and husband Will Smith, 55, are parents to two children — Jaden, 25, and Willow, 22, and also helped raise Will’s son Trey, 30, from a previous marriage.
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The Red Table Talk alum shared a video on Instagram of herself on Oct. 7, thanking fans for their support while she worked on Worthy, which will be released on Tuesday, Oct. 17.
“Your support has been like oxygen for me in times that have been so difficult, times that you don’t even know,” she said. “You’re about to see that your support was not in vain.”
She also hinted that she’ll soon open up about a “false narrative” that started after one of the most-watched episodes of Red Table Talk ever — likely the show about her “entanglement” with R&B singer August Alsina.
“You’re also about to see how on one of the most famous Red Table‘s of all time, how I assisted in a false narrative about myself that created a huge misunderstanding between myself and the public,” she shared.
Pinkett Smith will discuss her family and Will Smith slapping Chris Rock in a prime-time interview with Hoda Kotb airing Friday, Oct. 13, at 8 p.m. ET. on NBC.
