Jada Pinkett Smith says the greatest loss she endured was when she lost her own self
Jada Pinkett Smith had to endure many losses throughout her life, but the one loss that greatly affected her was when she lost herself. While having a discussion on dealing with death, the actress revealed that she grieved the most for the loss of her own self.
Smith was speaking on her Facebook Watch show titled Red Table Talk which also stars her daughter Willow Smith and her mother Adrienne Banfield-Norris. The show claims to provide "a forum where the perspectives of three different generations on a wide variety of topics are shared."
Smith revealed that she had been asked by the producers on the show to name the biggest loss she ever faced through her entire life's course.
"I said myself," Smith told her daughter Willow and mother Banfield-Jones on the second episode of the show. "When you realize that you’ve lost yourself, that’s devastating. It’s like, ‘How do I get myself back?’ "
Revealing that she had lost touch with her own self, Smith said, "I was withered, curled up in a ball about to die."
Smith also said that the main cause of her losing herself was the accumulated stress of her marriage, raising her daughter, co-parenting a step-son and the "whole Hollywood lifestyle" coupled with her professional persona.
"That’s been my life for the past 20 some years, battling and rearing," she explained. "Giving up my career to raise my children, that was a battle."
Smith even revealed to her daughter Willow that, although she did not regret anything about her family, at one point, she felt like she "got lost along the way". The solution to it, she said, was discovered when she woke up one day and asked herself how she could be happy.
"What makes you happy? And literally, I had no idea, to the point where I didn’t know how to dress myself. Fashion used to be my thing and I’m just now starting to pay attention to that again."
She added, "All these women out here on Xanax, drinking Chardonnay... It saddens me how a lot of women out here are numbing themselves just to survive in a way that they’ve been told they need to be to have happy lives... but are miserable."
When the discussion on the show moved to loss and death, Smith opened up about how hard it was for her to lose her best friend Tupac Shakur all those years ago. "A lot of people try to figure out my relationship with Pac. That was, you know, a huge loss in my life," she said.
"It definitely taught me a lesson. Which is that life is too short. Do not let disagreements stand in between you and people that you love," she said.
In the same episode, the singer-songwriter was reduced to tears when she found out that her daughter Willow was self-harming as a preteen. Smith claimed that she had no idea about it. The 17-year-old revealed that after the release of her hit single Whip My Hair, she "plunged into a black hole".
"I felt like I lost my sanity at one point," Willow told her mother and her grandmother. "It was right after that whole Whip My Hair thing. I had stopped taking singing lessons and I kind of was in this gray area of: Who am I? Do I have a purpose? Is there anything I can do besides this?"
"I was cutting myself and doing crazy things," she added.
"I had no idea," a stunned Smith told her daughter as she teared up. "I never saw any signs of that."