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Willow Smith Opens Up About Self-Harming When She Was Just 10 Years Old
15 May 2018, 16:09
Willow was just 10 years old when she started cutting herself due to the pressure of the music industry.
WARNING: This article contains details about self-harm that some may find upsetting.
Willow Smith has opened up about her history with self-harm in an emotional chat with her mother and grandmother.
Willow sat down with her mum, Jada Pinkett Smith to discuss "loss" on her new Facebook Watch talk show, Red Table Talk. In the video, she was asked about her biggest loss, to which she replied: "I honestly feel like I lost my sanity at one point."
"It was after that whole 'Whip My Hair' thing and and I had just stopped doing singing lessons and I was kind of just in this grey area of, 'Who am I? Do I have a purpose? Is there anything I can do besides this?'" she explained.
"After the tour, the promotion and all that, they wanted me to finish my album and I was like, I'm not going to do that. 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. It was just so crazy and I was plunged into this black hole, and I was cutting myself."
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Willow was just 10 years old when all the success of "Whip My Hair" came her way. Despite not telling her mother about it (Jada had no idea this was going on and found out for the first time in the video above), Willow revealed that she had one friend who she confided in about what she was doing. Now 17, she later says that while it was only a very short period, it's now been 5 years since she stopped self-harming.
"One night I was like, 'This is actually psychotic'. And I just stopped," she 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."
As Willow points out in the video, a lot of adolescent girls struggle with self harm in today's society. If you or anyone you know is struggling, you can find help and free resources at Mind if you're in the UK and NAMI if you're in the US.
