Photo Credit: Sikora Foto
Following her newly released and much awaited album B7, Brandy did an interview with People where she spoke about battling depression and how she almost wasn’t even here to make the album in the first place.
“I was a little bit lost eight years ago musically, creatively, spiritually,” she told the magazine detailing how she’s had her share of the good and definitely the bad side of the industry. “I had to pull myself together, I had to pull it all together and make it all make sense.”
The beginning of her career, from shooting to stardom with her sophomore album Never Say Never, her subsequent Grammy, becoming the first black woman to play Cinderella was all “pure joy.” But as time went on she said she started to feel trapped with her “perfect” public image. She had a child with producer Robert Smith in 2002 who she said the two married secretly the summer before. Their life on their reality show wasn’t all that she claimed which was revealed when Smith decided to tell the public the two had never married while in the middle of a media blitz he was doing.
“It changed people’s perspective of me,” she said about the public finding out she became a mother out of wedlock. “But I had to focus on what was important, which was Sy’rai.” Fast forward to 2006 and she found herself in court over a fatal car crash she was in where the other driver was killed. They settled out of court and she doesn’t speak on the crash out of respect for the family but she says it sent her into a deep depression.
“I remember laying in bed super depressed,” she says. “I [told] myself, ‘So, you’re just going to go out like this? That’s wack. You have a daughter. If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for her because this is not the way to leave a mark in her life.'” Speaking to the power of children, referencing her 18 year old high school graduate daughter, she says “If Sy’rai wasn’t here, I wouldn’t be either. The place that I was in, it just felt like I wasn’t going to make it through.”
On her new album B7 she has a song called Bye BiPolar where people wondered if she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder that she cleared up saying, “I was thinking, ‘Did I go too deep? Did I go too far in what I was singing about?’ But I didn’t dwell on those thoughts,” she says. She has however brought her life back by focusing on her mental health with therapy, meditation and journalling about her faith. “I’m in a place now,” says the singer, “where I can be proud of moving in the right direction.”
Suicide is a serious and real thing and it’s good to have her speak about this while we’re in the middle of a pandemic as suicide, divorce, breakups and domestic abuse have all seemed to be the norm these days. To hear a story of how someone else got through their struggle with it is important and definitely appreciated.
