In many ways, we’ve come to depend on George Clooney. But not just for ways to entertain our grandmothers when they’re in town that don’t involve talking about the shapes of the clouds — we rely on him to introduce us to new beautiful women, to tell us where we can donate our money to help people in Africa, and to explain to us which kinds of bodily functions are the funniest. And so with all the ways he impacts our lives, it’s hard to imagine what it would be like if he suddenly weren’t around. This is, of course, a hard pill to swallow because how would we know a woman is beautiful if George Clooney doesn’t proclaim that she is by dating her? But it turns out that at one point in time, we were very close to living in a world without him because in 2005, he was suicidal.
In the new issue of Rolling Stone, Clooney remembered how he was grappling with a painful back injury he sustained after completing a stunt in Syriana. He explained he was in the hospital and suffering from such awful headaches that he thought taking his own life was the only way he could ease the pain. He said, “I was at a point where I thought, ‘I can’t exist like this. I can’t actually live.’ I was lying in a hospital bed with an IV in my arm, unable to move, having these headaches where it feels like you’re having a stroke, and for a short three-week period, I started to think, ‘I may have to do something drastic about this’…but I never thought I’d get there. See, I was in a place where I was trying to figure out how to survive.”
Thankfully, some nurse or doctor must have realized the severity of Clooney’s situation and gave him something to soften the headaches, which in turn obviously reinstated the actor’s will to live. And you know, how good of them to realize three weeks of lollygagging around the hospital and having wheelchair races with each other was enough and that it was finally time to step up and give one of America’s finest some relief! How good of them to intervene, you know, because there’s really only so much a person can say about clouds.
