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To commemorate the 25th anniversary of her sophomore album, My Life, Mary J. Blige released a documentary on Amazon Prime with the same title of the album. During the documentary, she revisited a tumultuous time in her life that was plagued with substance abuse, depression and anxiety. In the doc, she reflected about how recording My Life was “probably the darkest time” in her life because not only was she addicted to drugs but she was also suicidal.
“I was just trying to drink my life away, take drugs til I die, whatever it was,” she said in the documentary. “Most of the time I was just depressed and I didn’t want to live. I’ve had plenty of dark times since then but this was a turning point, a decision I had to make, either live or die.”
She said during an overnight binge, she had an experience that led to her suicidal thoughts coming to an end.
“I was sitting in my living room, and I had been up all night long,” she said. “It looked like the window opened and all these clouds came in. I was just high out of my mind. My heart started racing. It was a Sunday morning, and I always feel strange on a Sunday morning, I always feel like God can really see what I’m doing. I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this. I gotta stop doing this.’ You choose life or you choose death. I chose life.”
Even though the “Thriving” singer is in a much better place in her life, she said she is still haunted by her trauma.
“My life is not in the sunshine,” Blige continued. “My life is hell. My life is me not being able to get things out of my head that happened to me, me not being able to get being molested out of my head. Other things that happened that I will not discuss — so many things happened to a little girl.”
If you haven’t seen the documentary, see the trailer below.
