But seldom has he shared the toll it took on his mental health.
In his memoir, “Adversity for Sale: Ya Gotta Believe,” published in August, the Southern trap-music pioneer opened up about how trauma from his youth followed him into adulthood and showed up as anxiety and depression, both of which he didn’t have the language to understand or describe. His emotional struggles eventually led him to get help.
“I learned that vulnerability is power — I thought something was wrong with me, ‘cause you’re thinking, ‘I come from poverty, this is how it is,’” Jeezy said Monday on the “Tamron Hall Show.” “I didn’t understand trauma and all these different things, so as I started to get the wordage for it and started to understand and grab tools, I started to become better.
“I didn’t know I was depressed for eight years of my life,” he continued. “[It felt] like you wake up, you want to go back to sleep forever — and I was leaning into my vices, and that’s what street life does to you.”
The “Put On” performer said he lost “two, three, four hundred people” to street violence while growing up. He said for so long “I wasn’t able to get in touch with my emotions.” Jeezy, whose legal name is Jay Wayne Jenkins, described himself during that period as “cold” and recalled when he went by a different moniker, Young Jeezy.
He went on to share how as a 13-year-old, he became the “man of the house” after his parents divorced. And the house was a small trailer where he lived with his mother and sister.
Jeezy is still reeling from his pending divorce from TV show host Jeannie Mai. Last month, after two years of marriage, the rapper filed the dissolution papers in Georgia. Jeezy is seeking joint legal and physical custody of their 1-year-old daughter, Monaco.
Mai, an Emmy-winning co-host of the syndicated talk show “The Real,” announced last week that she was taking a social media break amid the split. “Sometimes, you need to take a break and disconnect to heal,” said a handwritten note posted to Mai’s Instagram account.
Mai married Jeezy in March 2021after meeting him on “The Real.” The two have been open about raising their daughter and ensuring that she understands her mixed heritage.
“She’s a beautiful blend of being Black and Vietnamese, and I want her to really understand what that means as a powerful woman today,” Mai said earlier this year on “The Jennifer Hudson Show.”
The host explained how Monaco goes across the country to be with each of her parents’ families. The toddler — who Mai has said is more of a daddy’s girl — spends time in the South to be with Jeezy’s family based in Atlanta. Then the family goes to the Bay Area to be with her Vietnamese grandparents on her mother’s side.
Jeezy, one of the pioneers and most popular performers of trap music, first made his mark in the music industry in the early 2000s alongside fellow Georgia rappers T.I and Gucci Mane. His songs teem with vivid portrayals of the trap life — including boasts about drug dealing — and include club hits such as the 2010 single “Lose My Mind.” Jeezy also was not afraid to step into the philosophical and political arenas, most prominently in his 2008 album, “The Recession,” which heavily references people’s struggles amid the Great Recession in 2007-08.
“Adversity for Sale” fills in the narrative gaps between his music and is full of “never heard stories,” according to its publisher, HarperCollins. In September, it cracked the New York Times’ bestseller list in nonfiction hardcover.