somebody who kept the kids on a positive note.”
He continued, “He was like, 6’8″ and I was like 11, 12 years old so I was like 4’8″. Just to be funny, I said, ‘You guys gotta call me Big Sean and him Little Sean.’ ”
Sean often gives nods to his Detroit upbringing through his music, addressing the experience of growing up in the city.
Back in 2019, Big Sean made headlines by speaking out about mental health.
He went public in 2019 with his struggles with depression, which he’d been dealing with, along with anxiety, since he was a teenager, he hadn’t intended to become an advocate for mental health awareness. He was simply tired of portraying that everything in his life was great when it wasn’t.
“I was just being honest,” he tells ESSENCE. “I was just keeping it real because I was tired of not keeping it real. I was tired of pretending I was a machine and everything was cool and being politically correct or whatever. I just was like, I’m a just say how I feel.”
His revelation, as a major star in hip-hop, was a brave one, though. It helped spark conversations about how people cope when it comes to their mental health, particularly Black men. Now he’s taking things a step further in the hopes of helping everyone better deal with mental illness, and he’s doing so with help from his mom, educator Myra Anderson.
The two are teaming up for a video series through his nonprofit, the Sean Anderson Foundation, which supports underserved youth and their families.