IMANI BOYETTE
The first time Boyette tried to kill herself she was 10. “The worst pain in the world is waking up and knowing you can’t even kill yourself, that it’s not in your control,” she says. “What people don’t realize about suicide is that it’s like you’re brainwashed. None of my attempts made sense, but it feels like the perfect answer to make the pain stop in the moment. You think it will all be better if you can just disappear.”
Boyette, 22, is a center for the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream. She suffers from clinically diagnosed severe depression that she attributes to a combination of circumstance (she was raped as a child by a family member) and happenstance (her biological makeup). “You feel like because you’re not happy — when you should be happy — that you’re hurting people around you and a burden,” she says. “At a certain point, it just gets easier to shut up because people get sick of hearing you’re not OK when you’re not sick on the outside.”
Boyette says she tried to kill herself three times. “I wasn’t looking for help,” she says. “I wasn’t looking for resources. … I didn’t have anybody I could talk to, I could touch, who understands this hell I’m in.”
That’s why Boyette is telling her story. She wants to be the role model she wishes she’d had in her darkest hours, not that it’s easy to do. “Sometimes, I walk in a room and regret being so naked and vulnerable, but this is bigger than me,” she says. “I believe my purpose is to talk about the things that people are uncomfortable or afraid to talk about. … I need to talk about sexual abuse, because we don’t talk about it enough … The thing about childhood sexual abuse is people look at you like you’re this delicate piece of china. Or, they look at you disgusted, but don’t want to be disgusted.”
Her brother, JaVale McGee, plays for the NBA champion Golden State Warriors and her husband, Paul Boyette Jr., is a defensive tackle for the Oakland Raiders. They met when both were athletes at the University of Texas. She told him then about her childhood abuse, by way of explanation of her night terrors. “After I got married, I went into a deep depression, which makes no sense whatsoever,” she says. “It’s, like, the happiest time in your life. And it’s hard to convince your husband this is not because I don’t love you. I just can’t love you out of this depression, out of this fog.”
She describes the days when she can’t even get out of bed or brush her teeth. It’s as if she were in a straightjacket, she says, screaming in a soundproof room where no one can hear her, even her husband. Soon the screams are more like echoes and she envisions a glass wall where she presses her hand against his.
“I tell him just being there is enough,” she says, eyes moist. “You don’t have to understand or see my pain, but just acknowledge it. And be there.”