Chip Gaines Reveals Secret Battle With Depression & Emotional Breakdown
Chip Gaines brought himself out a depression but broke down over reading tweets, RadarOnline.com can exclusively reveal.
The Fixer Upper star revealed in his new memoir Capital Gaines: Smart Things I Learned Doing Stupid Stuff that his dream was to play professional baseball, but he was cut from Baylor University’s team in his sophomore year.
“The news hit me like a sucker punch to the gut,” he wrote. “And in the following months, I fell into something I can only describe as a deep depression.”
“The only dream I’d ever had was crushed,” he explained. “The weight of that held me down for the better part of a year.”
“My problem was that my dream was actually too big for me,” he continued. “And when that dream was lost, I was lost too.”
“But hiding away in my dorm room, fooling myself into believing I wasn’t made to do anything other than play a game, wasn’t going to work forever,” he added. “Apparently there’s a cap to the amount of self-pity time a person gets, because one morning I woke up and realized it was time to snap out of it.”
He went on to become an entrepreneur with his wife Joanna Gaines, and they started Magnolia Market together. Then, they plotted to get on TV together and their HGTV show was born.
But, Chip couldn’t handle the rigorous filming schedule and soon became an exhausted Twitter addict.
“I swear my tombstone will read ‘Death By Tweet,’” he wrote. “I am a serious Twitter aficionado. Want to make my day? Want to hurt my feelings? All you have to do is tweet at me. Those little 140-character messages can be like a hug or a dagger to the heart.”
He explained how he got a tweet at 3 a.m. from a customer who hadn’t received his Magnolia online order, and subsequently broke down.
“I was up all night dwelling on it,” he explained. “And Jo and I were scheduled to film at one of the projects we were working on the next morning, hair combed, by eight o’clock. Midway through our second shot of the day, I started to get this weird, not-good, fuzzy feeling. I thought I must be exhausted or dehydrated or something like that. I found a place to sit down and let my mind settle. But as I was sitting there, all of a sudden I was overwhelmed by a single thought. What am I doing here?”
He decided to end their show shortly after.
“It is with both sadness and expectation that we share the news that season 5 of Fixer Upper will be our last,” the 42-year-old wrote in a joint blog post with his 39-year-old wife. “While we are confident that this is the right choice for us, it has for sure not been an easy one to come to terms with. Our family has grown up alongside yours, and we have felt you rooting us on from the other side of the screen. How bittersweet to say goodbye to the very thing that introduced us all in the first place.”
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