“Days when I can’t escape the promotion of a movie associated with the saddest days of my life are darker,” she writes in a personal essay.

In a new personal essay, Wicked star Ethan Slater’s ex-wife has broken her silence, saying his relationship with pop star Ariana Grande has been inescapable for her amid the marketing blitz for the hit movie musical.

Without referring to Slater or Grande by name, clinical psychologist Dr. Lilly Jay opened up in The Cut about her troubles navigating her professional and personal lives a year after her childhood sweetheart filed for divorce and started a very public relationship with his Wicked co-star Grande, who herself had just split from ex-husband Dalton Gomez.

“Days when I can’t escape the promotion of a movie associated with the saddest days of my life are darker,” wrote Jay.

Jay started dating her high school sweetheart Slater in 2012 with the couple going on to marry in 2018 and welcome their son in 2022.

Ethan Slater (R) and Lilly Jay attend the 72nd Annual Tony Awards in 2018.Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Tony Awards Pro

Jay, who is a clinical psychologist in perinatal mental health and child development, writes that she fretted over her own pregnancy while counseling grieving mothers—all the while not realizing the “growing distance” between her and Slater.

She detailed fearing “loss of control and postpartum depression” until “one day in London, I looked up and found that they had both arrived.”

The tabloid fodder around the dissolution of her marriage—and how much Grande factored into its end—only added to her perils as a private person, she wrote.

The singer and actress has previously blasted speculation that she had any role in Slater and Jay’s break-up.

“Over a year after the end of my marriage was made public, I deeply miss the life of invisibility I created for myself as a psychologist specializing in women’s mental health,” Jay wrote.

Although Slater has moved on, Jay said they remain devoted to loving their son “100 percent of the time.”

“Both of us fiercely love our son regardless of how our parenting time is divided,” she wrote.

She explained that her essay served to tell her prospective clients what they need to know about her given she has become a tabloid figure.

“If you want to or need to, we can acknowledge what you now know about me, and then we’ll quickly work our way back to your story with a question that is a therapy classic for good reason,” she said, adding, “And how did that make you feel?”

Ariana Grande, Bowen Yang and Ethan Slater.Theo Wargo/Getty Images

Grande plays Glinda the Good Witch in the musical film opposite Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba. Slater stars in the film as the munchkin, Boq.

About Grande’s performance in Wicked, Slater said she was a “comedy genius” during an interview with Jennifer Hudson.

Slater was also nominated for a Tony Award for his starring role in the SpongeBob SquarePants Broadway show.