Musician and Idols judge Unathi opened up about her struggle with depression. The star sat down for an interview on My Truth, where she discussed her depression and alcoholism, the deep grief and sorrow she felt after her very public divorce and the way she is now reclaiming her sense of self and of worth.
Image: Unathi IG
During the interview, Unathi shared how she came to realise that she was depressed. She shared in part, “For me once I heard those words “you are clinically depressed”, I knew that I didn’t want that to be my constant state and I had to start therapy. So therapy has been a consistency in my life but not just in the formal sense. Speaking with people and doing those kinds of things that feed me because also what I’ve realised is I can’t give from an empty vessel. And that’s one of the things I don’t compromise on, I come first. Communicating what I need to be able to be someone who can give.”
Speaking on her divorce, she shares that the work she’d done to be better didn’t matter because she was going through a rough period. She said in part, “Those things didn’t matter. You’re in survival mode firstly so I instantly developed a dependency on alcohol. So when it comes to routines and how do you go to the next step, those are secondary to survival. For me, I was dealing with the shame of not being able to keep up with the dream. Because they put marriage out there and you’re someone’s wife, you’re a mother. So for me, it was the shame of not being able to keep that up. Wanting to leave that so badly that I didn’t care what that meant to society. I didn’t care what that meant to the elder women. I just didn’t have anything so I went to the bottle because I needed to cope. Whether it was mourning the love of my life but I still had to see him every day.”
On how she recovered from the difficult divorce she shares, ” I hit rock bottom and I allowed myself to stay there. Because I think that’s another thing that society wants to make you believe is that you have to have it together. So I allowed myself to stay there because I knew it was passing and I knew that I had to go through what I was going through then to be able to start building myself. So once I was okay with being there, I started then introducing the routine. I was in therapy every week, I’d wake up at 5 am every morning. During that time I stopped doing the breakfast show so I still wanted to be up at 5 am so that’s when I’d wake up and go to the gym because exercising gives us endorphins which are the happy drugs so I knew those happy drugs would last me throughout the day. And that made me a more pleasant person.”
Unathi opens up about her struggle with depression. Take a look at what she had to say.