Jeezy Recalls ‘Brief Moment’ He Almost Took His Own Life To Escape The Street Life

Jeezy has opened up about a “brief moment” from his past when he almost took his own life and what drove him to contemplate the idea.

On Wednesday (August 8), the Snowman sat down with PEOPLE to discuss his new book Adversity For Sale, and reflected back on a time in his younger years when he attended the Youth Challenge program in Fort Stewart, Georgia following years of dealing drugs and stealing cars. He said the program wasn’t a “walk in the park.”

“You’re basically in the Marines or the Army and people are telling you what to do. You gotta shine your boots,” the Atlanta rapper said. “I don’t know about anybody else [but] I’m just not good at being told what to do. And I’m coming from a place where I’m basically a boss. But maybe a few weeks in I’m like, ‘Hold up, I’m working out.'”

He continued: “It taught me structure. And it took me out of the environment that I was in for me to become even more focused than I was because I thought I was focused, but I really wasn’t. I didn’t have a plan. I just was going through the motions.”

As the nine-month program drew to a close, a young Jeezy remembered a defining field trip he took to a naval base and stood aboard one of their ships.

“I remember standing there and saying to myself: ‘Man, if you go back home and you don’t figure this out. Because I don’t want to end up like my friends,'” he explained. “My friends became junkies and they were getting killed and all these things.”

He continued: “So it was all this stuff in my head. I just remember standing there and it was for a brief moment, I would say at least about 10 minutes, I actually contemplated jumping in the water. I had never had suicidal thoughts, but I [thought], ‘Well, shit, if I just jump in the water, I ain’t gotta deal with this. I ain’t gotta go back home. I gotta do none of these things.'”

However, Jeezy said he didn’t go through with it because something inside him told him: “‘No, bro. You gonna have to man up. You gonna have to go back home. You got to figure this out.'” When he left the youth program, he believed he was “ready for anything.”

He concluded that ruminating on these dark moments in his new book has been a therapeutic experience for him.

“I felt like I dealt with it on the surface. But now I’m digging deep,” he told PEOPLE. “I was just going through all these different emotions that I didn’t go through when these things happened because I was numb and I just felt like I just had to keep moving.”

Jeezy has been speaking a lot about his new book in recent weeks, and most recently sat down with the Rap Radar Podcastto share even more details about the memoir. However, he pivoted for a moment to discuss his 2008 song “Done It,” and said he believed it to be his crowning achievement as a musical artist.

“Hall & Oats was taking some time to clear the sample, and I kinda felt like it didn’t belong on there because it sonically sounded so different,” he said of the song, which was recorded for his 2008 album The Recession but ultimately didn’t make the cut.

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“I put it on the mixtape Trappin’ Ain’t Dead. And I went to Detroit one day, and some type of way my DJ played that shit — and man, it was unfucking real! I was like, ‘Yo, could we put on the album?’ And that’s how it got on to [streaming]. I love the song, but it didn’t sound like a rap song. It sounded like it was in its own sandbox.

“So we put it on the end of the record [as a bonus cut], and if you ask me what’s the best record I ever recorded, I’d tell you it’s ‘Done It All.’ Because I felt every bar on there.”

In a separate sit-down with Good Morning America earlier this month, Jeezy elaborated even further on his new book Adversity For Sale and said the memoir was meant to inspire people to follow their dreams and deal with failure.

“I think people always tell you about their success stories, but one thing that I’ve learned about life is that in every failure there’s a lesson,” he said. “And every time I ever failed it set me up for my next task. I think to share your failures with your community and your peers and people that love you.”