Sure, he looks tough but even Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has struggled with overcoming his own obstacles, And that includes depression.
Before he became a major movie star (one that made $52 million last year), he went through a bit of a rough patch. An only-seven-dollars-in-his-pocket rough patch.
He found himself cut from playing football in the Canadian Football League and was forced to move back into his parents’ house. “I literally said, ‘How much money do I have?’ I pulled it out – and it wasn’t all paper money either – so it was about seven bucks, and at that time it was the worst time in my life,” he recounts to Access Hollywood. “(I) fell into depression, had to overcome that.”
“Depression sometimes, especially if we don’t know what it is, it creeps up on us, it knocks us out. I mean, it can knock us out,” he says, noting that he’s dealt with three bouts of depression. “And then once you start to realize what it is, then we all have a certain coping mechanism that we have to go through with depression, but in that case, when I had seven bucks in my pocket, I had to move back in with my parents. I had no money. I’m 24 years old, and I thought it was the worst time in my life. And at that time it was, but now I look back (and) it was also the most defining time in my life.”
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on his depression
But he learned to never give up.
“It rocked me to the core, and when you get knocked down that way – and all of us have been down before – when you get knocked down like that, when you come back up, you come back up stronger,” he explained. “Hopefully you come back up a little smarter and then you start the next chapter.”
“That next chapter for me was all right, I’m gonna get better, I’m gonna get through this, and I was really fortunate. “
