Jada Pinkett Smith Breaks Silence on Marriage, Oscar Slap and Her Path to 'Self-Acceptance' (Exclusive)

“Here we go,” Jada Pinkett Smith whispers to herself.

The Los Angeles photo studio is quiet. Jada is about to speak about her life. And what a life it has been up to this point. From the streets of Baltimore where she sold drugs, to the zenith of Hollywood.

And it’s there, right at the very height of moviedom, front row at the Academy Awards in 2022, where she watched her husband Will Smith slap Chris Rock on the Oscar stage, on live television after Rock made a joke about Jada’s shaved head (she lives with alopecia).

Well, that’s what the silence is about. She gets it. Jada knows everyone has been waiting 18 months for her to say something. Here it is.

"I thought, ‘This is a skit.’ " Like many people watching the incident unfold on live TV, she didn’t believe it was real at first. “I was like, ‘There’s no way that Will hit him,’ ” Jada, 52, recalls. “It wasn’t until Will started to walk back to his chair that I even realized it wasn’t a skit.” The first words she uttered to Will once they were alone after the show were “Are you okay?”

The answer is a work in progress, one that Jada has written about — among many other topics, including her difficult childhood and their complicated marriage — in her riveting new book Worthy, out Oct. 17. “I’m going to be by his side,” she says of her 55-year-old husband, “but also allow him to have to figure this out for himself.”

But Jada, as she details in her book, had quite a life before March 27, 2022. Perhaps lives is a better way to put it. “I was living a lot of them at one time.”

The daughter of parents with substance abuse issues, Jada survived a tough Baltimore childhood to show immense promise as a performer. She studied theater for one year at North Carolina School for the Arts before making her way to Hollywood — and landing a TV role (A Different World) and in films such as Set It Off, Menace II Society, The Nutty Professor, Collateral and The Matrix.

Of course, along the way, she met a hot young actor named Will. After meeting multiple times in passing — and once he got divorced from his first wife Sheree Zampino — he called Jada and asked, “Who are you going out with?” Replying that she was single, Will declared: “Well, you’re going out with me now.”

Laughing at the recollection, Jada says, “Can you believe I fell for that?”

Her life has been filled with immense highs (touring with her band Wicked Wisdom, the births of her two children, her “bonus son” Trey from Will’s first marriage, creating the talk show Red Table Talk) and lows and even lower lows, she says. And yet, she says it’s at the lowest part where she began to find clarity.

“When I turned 40, I was in so much pain. I couldn’t figure a way out besides death. So I made a plan.”

Jada is aware of how her life looked from the outside, especially about a decade ago. The glamour and the smiles, the mansion, gowns and movie premieres. The “they have it all” of it all. “But, while I was really living the dream, I hit a huge wall — a massive amount of depression. I think that I looked at having outside sources to supplement for the voids that I was feeling inside.”

She said the “voices” were incoming. “‘Just kill yourself. You're not worth anything, you ain't s---.’ ” Jada began to plot her death. “I started looking for places, cliffs where I could have an accident, because I didn't want my kids to think that their mother had committed suicide.”

Jada says a chance conversation in her own kitchen provided a glimmer of hope. Friends of her son Jaden mentioned that their dad had gone through an ayahuasca ceremony, where a leader supplies a plant-based psychedelic drug, usually brewed into a tea to drink, and guides the subject through hallucinations.

“Ayahuasca helped me, it gave me a new intimate relationship with myself that I had never had before.” Jada says since the first time she took the drug, “the suicidal thoughts completely went away.”

Jada says her husband and children — "as adults" — have also taken ayahuasca. She knows that her family life, and in particular her marriage, are a topic of fascination for many people. She remembers how they first got together.

"Will called me up one day and said, ’Hit me when you get to L.A.’ and then ... click. And I was like, ‘Whoa. Okay.’ And so when I got to L.A., I called him. I haven't been able to get rid of him since.”

Once they got together, Jada says there was no turning back. She was, at the time — while her career was taking off — being treated for depression, suicidal ideation, and taking medication. “Once I met Will, I completely abandoned my mental health. I was so intoxicated by him and our dynamic. I really felt like I'm cured.” She stopped taking Prozac. “He became the drug.”

For more on Jada Pinkett Smith, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.

Their marriage, held in a quiet ceremony in Baltimore on New Year’s Eve in 1997, while she was pregnant with Jaden has long been a subject of fascination by fans. Immediately upon their union they were crowned Hollywood royalty, which brought a lot of gossip and speculation.

“We’re still figuring it out,” Jada says of the state of their marriage. She says they had been separated for six years before the Oscars in 2022. “We’ve been doing some really heavy-duty work together. We just got deep love for each other and we are going to figure out what that looks like for us.”

As for her kids: “My children, they’re little gurus. They’ve taught me a deep sense of self-acceptance.”

“They love every part of me,” she says of Jaden, 25, Willow, 22, and Trey, 30. “The level of love, unconditional love that they have for me and their dad. And it's one thing to want to be the person that gives that unconditional love. And then there's, to be the recipient of that.”

Jada remembers the moment Jaden saved her life. “I've learned how to tune into each one of them and understand their superpowers. And so when Jaden came to me that day and he's like, ‘Mom, you got to to hear this. My friend’s dad, he had this experience. I need you to come in here and listen.’ I'm like, ‘I'm there. What is it?’ And it opened up a whole new world of healing that I'm so grateful for.”

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text "STRENGTH" to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.