Kaitlyn wasn’t in a great place when she left WWE.
Former WWE star Celeste Bonin (FKA Kaitlyn) recently appeared on The Sessions with Renée Paquette and looked back on asking for her release from the company. Bonin would credit feeling irrelevant and not being able to cope with some of the feelings she had as to why she asked to depart the company back in 2014.
“My time in WWE, it would be easy to say it f-cked me up. However, I now realize — and I thought that for a long time and that’s why I didn’t do anything in wrestling for a really long time until the Mae Young [Classic] — that was such a big deal to me because I like literally didn’t know how to process it,” she said. “Any time that I’d do an appearance or a signing or something or talk about wrestling, I’d have these feelings that I didn’t know how to process and I didn’t know how to not have them, essentially. Everything I looked at in wrestling, the painful sh-t and the things I went through and was struggling with during my time there also the really, like profoundly beautiful things, all the opportunities, the travel, the connections, the love available to me from fans and my peers and the deep connections that I made.”
Bonin said that all of the things she went through showed her that she had some internal struggles going on. While she didn’t want to talk about wrestling for a long time, she eventually learned how to shift her perspective and deal with things in a healthy way.
“I left wrestling because I thought I was gonna get fired, I felt less and less relevant, I had so much shame. I gained all this weight and my body was giving me every signal that I was just not OK, emotionally, mentally, I just had so much hatred for myself,” she explained. “I had so much resentment towards myself and that projected outwards and like, I was in self-destruct mode. So, I just asked for my release on a day…it was just like a really shitty day. I was so disassociated with so much from that day, because it was just so painful,” Bonin said. “I didn’t understand why I was doing these things, I just was like, ‘I don’t know how to do what I wanna do’ and for a long time, I hated the way that I left. Because I ripped myself out of the only love and support that I’ve had really my whole life.
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“But I didn’t know how to receive any of it, so I was like, ‘oh well, maybe this is time for me to leave’ and I had gotten engaged really fast and I just felt like I needed to go on a hiatus and figure my sh-t out. So, I left and I got a couple months severance and I didn’t know what I was gonna do and I felt that I literally didn’t have anything to give or share, I felt so lost, so I just got married and I was like, ‘oh, I’ll start a business!’ and I thought that maybe I could do that,” Bonin said. “I didn’t know anything about business and I don’t know anything about clothing manufacturing and stuff and I can see this now, it was just me replacing wrestling and wrestling was replacing fitness and competing.”
“So, the only relevance that I felt, especially in my teen years,” she noted, “I started to find my identity in being really muscular and strong, so I started working out a lot and I competed right when I got out of high school. I was like, this is how I’m going to get love and respect and be something in the world. So, when I started doing that, I had some success but after the first couple shows that I did, I started having really f-cked up body dysmorphia and I didn’t understand nutrition and I didn’t know how to take care of myself.”
Paquette noted that body dysmorphia has been a very big topic as of late, and Bonin said it’s been interesting peeling back the layers and looking back at her life. Asked how she finally reached a tipping point where she needed to pull herself out of her situation, Bonin said she eventually got into mastermind groups and coaching, and eventually got healthy. She noted how she can see in hindsight how cool creating her Celestial Bodiez line was, and coaching is also how she later met her husband, Grant, noting their first meeting was an “elevator moment.”
Related: Kaitlyn Comments On Accidental Battle Royale Win & Disappointing Title Reign
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