Lil Wayne has opened up about the mental health struggles that caused him to attempt suicide when he was just 12 years old.
The rap star said he wanted to appear on an episode of Emmanuel Acho’s Uncomfortable Conversations “figuring I can help, hoping I can help anyone else out there who’s dealing with mental health problems by … being vulnerable.
“I look at it as being brave and stepping up.”
Wayne said he was around 10 when he started have dark thoughts. “I couldn't have what I wanted, what I dreamed of, what I desired, and that was to rap," he said. “I was willing to die for it.”
Wayne recalled the day he feared a confrontation with his mother over skipping school to work on his rap. He called the police and then took a gun from her bedroom and shot himself in the chest. He said he woke up to the sound of officers knocking on the door.
“Blood pouring out of my chest so much that it made it easy to slide with my shirt on the wood across the floor,” Wayne recalled. “The only energy I had left was to kick the door and I start hearing them go crazy. Like ‘Someone’s in there! Someone’s in there!”
The officers knocked the door off its hinges and one of them rushed him to hospital in a cruiser.
Wayne said his near-death experience changed his mother forever. “The mom that I knew before that day ... I have never met or seen or heard that lady again in my life,” he said. “So I didn't die that day, but somebody was gone. She's never been that way [again].
“Changed life for her, [me] and our whole family.”
Wayne said he had no one to talk to about his feelings when he was growing up. “You have no one to vent to, no one to get this out to,” he said. “You can’t bring it to your friends at school – you’re still trying to be cool to them. You’re not trying to let them know you’ve got something going on at home.”
Becoming successful did little to improve his mental health, Wayne admitted. He often struggled with feelings of loneliness despite being surrounded by people.
Wayne explained: “You start to think, ‘[Does] anyone actually care? Will it matter when it’s all over? Will I matter?’ And that’s always the question. Will you matter when it’s all over? Not the things you’ve done, the things you’ve done for everyone else, but will you actually matter to them? But most of all to you?”
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, click here to find people who can help.