Willow Smith, daughter of Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith, opened up about a painful secret she hid from her family for years.
Willow, who is now 17 years old, appeared on the second episode of Jada’s Red Table Talk series and spoke of losing her sanity and about cutting herself after she skyrocketed to fame with her song “Whip My Hair.”
“I would have to say—honestly, I feel like I lost my sanity at one point,” Willow said. “It was after that whole ‘Whip My Hair’ thing, and I had just stopped doing singing lessons and I was kind of like, just in this gray area of, ‘Who am I? Do I have a purpose? Is there anything, like, I can do besides this?’
“After the tour and the promotion and all of that, they wanted me to finish my album,” she said. “And I was like—I’m not gonna do that. And after all of that kinda settled down and it was like a kind of lull, I was just listening to a lot of dark music, and it was just so crazy and I was just like plunged into this black hole, and I was, like, cutting myself.”
At the time, Willow was only 10 years old and was seen on just about every television screen, in every country, promoting her music.
“What?” Jada said.
“Yeah, and doing crazy things,” Willow said.
“When were you cutting yourself?” Jada asked. “I didn’t see that part.”
“Cutting yourself where?” Jada asked.
“On my wrist. I mean, you can’t even see it, but there’s still a little something there, but, like, I totally lost my sanity for a moment there,” Willow said.
“I never talk about it because it was such a short, weird point in my life, but you have to pull yourself … out of it,” Willow said. “I honestly felt like I was experiencing so much emotional pain, but my physical circumstances weren’t reflecting that.”
Willow went on to admit that her brothers, Jaden and Trey, knew about the cutting and that she did eventually stop.
“I was just like. ‘This is actually psychotic,’ and after that, I just stopped,” she said. “It’s been, like, five years.”
Jada admitted that she never saw any signs of the cutting, but Willow informed her mother and grandmother Adrienne Banfield Norris that a lot of adolescents struggle with cutting and other forms of self-harm.
Take a look at the video below: