Jada Pinkett Smith opens up about her life.
The 52-year-old star opened up in her new memoir. Valuabledetailing her marriage to Will Smith, her mental health issues, and her upbringing.
He also spoke of leading a double life as an artist at school and a drug dealer on the streets.
“When you’re not your parents’ priority, you don’t know how to be a priority for yourself. “I had parents who were addicted to drugs,” he told People.
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Jada was raised in different homes, sometimes with her maternal grandmother and sometimes with her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, a heroin addict who would become sober and eventually become a pillar in her life. Her father, who would be violent at times, was in and out of her life. (Robsol Pinkett Jr. died in 2010.)
“Not having a healthy foundation, as I discovered in my adulthood, had some really strong effects on how I viewed myself,” she explains.
“I knew I had to cover whatever I needed,” Jada explained. “I decided to sell drugs.”
“When I was a kid, drug dealers were the ones with wealth. That’s what we easily consider a success. And for me, considering my circumstances at the time, my mother was not well. She was a high-functioning heroin addict. We didn’t have the things we should have. The house we lived in was not taken care of.”
She also had several jobs, “legitimate jobs,” from the age of 12, including working at The Gap and as a telemarketer. “Having money in my pocket was a must… I just wanted financial freedom,” she says.
“What if something happens to my mother? What if she doesn’t come home one night? Whether overdosed, arrested, whatever. And then I decided to sell drugs. “I decided to sell crack,” she continued to explain.
Due to the drug epidemic in Baltimore in the 1980s, he explained: “The drugs were going to get to you, period. You could use them, you could sell them, but there was no way to be in an environment like that and drugs don’t touch you. And I’m not saying it’s okay, of course, to have a completely different mindset now. But when you live in a war zone and all you think about is survival, I wasn’t trying to do drugs. Surely she wasn’t going to be the girlfriend of a drug dealer. But he wanted money so he could be independent. She wanted to take care of me.”
“I thought I was going to be the queen, for sure. You can get caught up in the landscape. I was playing with some high rollers at the time. That’s another Jada, another Jada who would chase someone down the alley with a switchblade because she stole $700. Or the Jada who sold crack and then they set a trap for her and two guys came in with nine millimeters and pointed a gun at her head.”
Find out what the biggest revelations are in her book about her marriage to Will Smith.
Categories: Biography
Source: vcmp.edu.vn