It’s hard to believe that it has been eight years since Willow Smith first bounced onto the music scene with “Whip My Hair.”
However, what many people don’t know is that song created a rift between Willow and her famous parents as well as affected her mentally. On Monday’s episode of Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk, the subject matter was forgiveness, and Willow came clean about having to learn to forgive her father, Will Smith.
“I definitely had to forgive you and daddy for that whole ‘Whip My Hair’ thing,” Willow said. “It was mostly daddy because he was so harsh at certain times. It was a couple of years, honestly.
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“Trying to regain trust for not feeling like I was being listened to or like no one cared how I felt,” she added.
Willow was just 10 when the song became a sensation, and while she didn’t go into specifics, it comes off that she was deeply affected by how she was treated.
“And I had to forgive myself because I felt guilty because everyone is trying to make me better, trying to make my dream. But I didn’t really understand what my dream entailed,” she said. Earlier this year on Red Table Talk, Willow opened up about becoming so depressed that she began cutting herself.
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“After all of that kind of settled down and it was a kind of lull, like I was just listening to a lot of dark music and it was just so crazy,” she said in May, “and I was just plunged into this black hole, and I was like cutting myself,” she said. “I feel like I lost my sanity at one point,” Smith said of the time surrounding her song’s release. “I had just stopped doing singing lessons and I was kind of just in this gray area of ‘Who am I? Do I have a purpose? Is there anything I can do besides this?'”