What to Know
If you’ve ever heard a phrase like “working you blind” or something to that effect, maybe Jennifer Lopez made it up. Alright, probably not, but she did admit to once going temporarily blind from working herself so hard and stretching herself too thin. Jennifer, or JLo if you’re nasty, appeared on the SmartLess podcast and spoke about a time in her career when she was doing so much that she lost her vision.
It wasn’t just a moment of blurred vision and then everything coming back into focus. It also wasn’t the common aura that those with extreme migraine headaches often face. Instead, according to JLo, it was full-blown blindness that was temporary, but terrifying all the same to the singer, actress, and dancer.
Jennifer Lopez said she once lost her sight due to working too much.
JLo might not be the hardest working woman in show business, but she might have come close to it at least once during her long career as a dancer, singer, and actress. When she appeared on the SmartLess podcast, she shared a particularly difficult time in her career when she was booked and busy, but also, it turns out, a lot more stressed than Jenny from the block probably was back in the day.
“When I was doing Enough, I think I had done like four movies in a row, and I had recorded my second album or something like that, so the “JLo” album, which was really big. And I was working, filming every day, as you guys know what that is, you know, all the hours,” she shared on the podcast. “And then I would go into the studio at night, and then on the weekends, I had junkets or video shoots or whatever. And I remember not clocking that I had worked like 98 days in a row without taking a day off.”
One day on the set of Enough, JLo began to feel what sounds like panic attack symptoms at work. She went to her trailer and, she noted, “all of a sudden,” she was unable to see.
“Like, it was almost like I couldn’t see clearly, like something just went over my eyes, and I couldn’t move,” she added. JLo went to the hospital and a doctor explained that her body had shut down from being overworked. It was a temporary physical result of all the hard work JLo was putting in at the time, but it was also likely a reminder for her to slow down.
There was a time when she was putting out movies pretty frequently.
Believe it or not, there is a debate among JLo fans, and even just casual observers of her work, about whether she is a better performer as a singer or as an actress. When she had her health scare during the filming of Enough around 2001, she had just filmed The Cell, The Wedding Planner, and Angel Eyes. Maid in Manhattan also came out around the same time as Enough.
On a Reddit thread about JLo’s career in the entertainment industry, some users confirmed that they do prefer JLo as an actress. Which might only make her want to push herself to make more movies, and land her in the same position as before. Then again, she likely learned from her mistake the first time around.
“Her music seems to be just mediocre, okay songs to me,” the user who posted the Reddit thread wrote. “I think that she’s just an okay but untalented musician. However when it comes to acting, she is marvelous. I think acting is where her talent lies and that she’s better at acting than in music.”
Stress blindness is a real thing.
JLo may be a lot of things, and dramatic is definitely one of them (orange drink, if you know, you know), but going temporarily blind from stress is actually a real thing. According to Healthline, a traumatic event typically leads to psychogenic blindness or conversion disorder.
While JLo didn’t open up about specific trauma that led to her blindness, which did go away, she was clearly under a lot of stress at the time. Maybe she just needed to visit a bodega for a ham and cheese on a roll.
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