US actress Jada Pinkett Smith and actor Will Smith arrive for the 27th Annual Critics Choice Awards at the Fairmont Century Plaza hotel in Los Angeles on March 13, 2022.
“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… had smoldered… Unwelcome feelings… 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. I would later be diagnosed… that I suffer from complex trauma with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)… I had sought help everywhere... Will and I weren’t in a good place and hadn’t been for a while… We couldn’t hear or see each other — at all… I’d fallen into despair and wanted to be on this earth less and less… Suicidal thoughts were not completely new to me,” so writes Jada Pinkett Smith in her new memoirs entitled Worthy.
She boldly faces her own ghosts — her own sort of “afflicted existence” — a life that cannot be Photoshopped away and that’s less glamourous like photos that lose their soul once scanned. Like the way poems lose a certain inflection when translated from one language to another — as she spins for us a tale of human need and longing, of depression, of loss, and of hope.
