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Life hasn’t always been a barrel of laughs for Wayne Brady, who has recently decided to share his experience of living with depression.

Wayne has cracked us up for years on shows like “Whose Line Is It Anyway,” “Chapelle’s Show” and “How I Met Your Mother.” Sadly, he’s been dealing with a lot of pain behind the scenes, which might come as a shock to most people because he’s so funny.

“People are like, ‘Wayne Brady’s always happy!'” Wayne told “Entertainment Tonight” during a recent interview. “No I’m not. Because I’m human.”

Wayne said that for him, being depressed is more than just having a bad day or a bad week. He likens it to having a bad life, where he sometimes gets so mired in negativity that he can’t function.

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“Some days, you don’t want to move, you can’t move in the darkness,” he explains. “You’re like, ‘I am just going to sit right here and I want to wallow in this. As much as it hurts, I am going to sit right here because this is what I deserve. This is what I deserve, so I am going to sit here because I am that horrible of a person.'”

The turning point for Wayne was his 42nd birthday last year, when he hit rock bottom emotionally. Holding nothing back about the comedian gave a very stark description about his low point.

“I was there by myself, in my bedroom and I had a complete breakdown,” said Wayne. “Just go ahead and imagine for yourself a brother in his underwear, in his room, you got snot…and that birthday was the beginning of, ‘OK, I’ve got to make a change.'”

He was careful to point out that this was simply the moment he knew that he couldn’t allow himsef to continue to wallow. The comedian explained that depression is a lot like a cycle, where you tell yourself a lot of bad lies about yourself. The internal script is so aggressive that it eventually becomes true to you, and you no longer see the value in your own life.

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Having a breakdown on his birthday was simply the starting point for his journey to healing. It still wasn’t an immediate change for Wayne.

“It took me a while to get my stuff together to go, ‘You know what? If you’re not happy, you have to do something about it,'” he said . “Just to admit that you are feeling this way is a huge step. To claim that, to say, ‘Why do I feel dark? Why do I feel unhappy? Let me do something about this.'”

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