Contributed By Scott Lipscomb

A year after her suicide attempt, Tamar Braxton is driven to surround herself with positivity.

The former reality star and host of the podcast Under Construction with Tamar is opening up about the July 16, 2020 incident and how she’s moving forward from it.

Braxton was home with her son and then boyfriend David Adefeso who found her unresponsive before being rushed to the hospital.

“That time of my life was so dark and so heavy,” she tells PEOPLE in one of this week’s cover stories. “I didn’t see how I was going to come out on the other side. I didn’t even know that there was another side. But I chose to change my life.”

“Most people think, ‘Oh, she went to a hotel, probably took a bunch of drugs, was on a binge.’ It didn’t happen like that. It was just everyday life, trying to figure out how to get through the day and then …” Braxton continues, stopping short of reliving exactly what happened.

“I thought I had successfully buried that part of me, but it was manifesting in different ways,” continues Braxton, who was often shown to be on edge and irritable on her shows. “It was coming out in how I dealt with things emotionally, how I looked at situations, how I conducted myself.”

Braxton shares that she started to feel boxed into an increasingly negative onscreen persona. Things came to a head during the filming of Get Ya Life!, which she says sensationalized her life as a single mom and her admittedly rocky relationship with Adefeso.

“After a scene, I’d watch it back, and it would be nothing like how it went down,” she says. “They started piecing words together and sentences. I just thought that wasn’t necessary.”

“I wanted to do positive television,” says Braxton, who felt even her family’s show had taken a tonal turn. In recent years Braxton has been at odds with her sisters and mother, both onscreen and off.

The break from these shows was most directly to be a better mother and better role model to Logan.

“I still love television,” she says, “but I’m definitely not ever doing another docuseries about my life.”
“I’m dedicated to being the best mom, the best person I can be,” Braxton adds. “I am moving forward.”