After much loss, Sharon Stone is to live “for joy”.
The iconic actress, whose fame peaked with films such as Basic instinct It is Casinoalso dealt with devastating setbacks, notably a near-fatal stroke in 2001. In her seven years of life, she said The Hollywood Reportershe was left with “zero money”.
“I had a near-death experience and then they brought me back,” she describes. “I bled into my brain for nine days, so my brain was pushed to the front of my face. It wasn’t positioned in my head where it was before. And as that was happening, everything changed. My sense of smell, my sight, my touch. I couldn’t read for a couple of years. Things were stretched out and I was seeing patterns of color. A lot of people thought I was going to die.”
Amid nearly a decade of recovery, his multimillion-dollar fortune, according to Stone, has dwindled to nothing.
“People took advantage of me during that time. I had $18 million saved up because of all my success, but when I went back to my bank account, it was all gone,” she says. THR“My refrigerator, my phone — everything was in other people’s names.”
More than two decades after that life-changing ordeal, Stone lives by a mantra that may resonate with others facing obstacles in their own lives.
“If you bite the seed of bitterness, it never leaves you. But if you keep faith, even if that faith is the size of a mustard seed, you will survive,” she says. “So I live for joy now. I live for purpose.”
That’s not to say that getting to this point was easy. Although she survived the bloodletting, that was just the beginning for Stone, as she was left to manage the damage that the brain injury had left behind.
“I was walking, an uneven, slouching gait, my right leg dragging a little, the left side of my face distorted and low, no feeling from my knee to my left leg. I was talking, not knowing I was stuttering, not realizing that the walls didn’t actually have blocks of color on them,” she described in her 2021 memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice. “I had lost directional hearing in my right ear and gained a lot of weight. I was now a staggering size two, at five feet eight and a half inches.”
“My right ear was so screwed up that I had to turn my head to the left and watch people’s lips to understand what they were saying… I had an incomplete sense of what was going on around me… I had lost my short-term memory,” Stone added. “… I wouldn’t be able to read for another two years or remember where I had put my teacup. But I was standing and I was alive.”
She was eventually diagnosed and medicated for a brain seizure, but the side effects would persist for many years.
“As I sit here now, almost two decades later, the right side of my head still hurts. That’s where the brain damage is, where the scar tissue is. My hearing is back, although sometimes I have to turn my head a little to block out sounds that might interfere with what I’m trying to hear,” she explained in her book.
However, true to his philosophy, Stone does not exclude joy.
“Now that I am myself again, or this me again,” she wrote, “I have a happy home, full of laughter and fun.”
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