Sometimes, painful life decisions are necessary for us to thrive. Gisele Bündchen has been happily married to Tom Brady for 10 years, but before that, she spent five years in a high-profile relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio. Now, in her new book and in interviews about its surprising contents, Bündchen is opening up about why she broke things off with DiCaprio in 2005.
In October, Bündchen released her first book, Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life. In one part of the book, she talks about how early in her career, when she and DiCaprio were deeply in love and seemingly at the height of stardom, she experienced debilitating panic attacks that left her in a very dark place because of how much she was working. After thoughts of suicide pushed her to go home, spend more time with her family and adjust her habits in order to feel better and move through her life differently, she realized that her relationship with DiCaprio wasn’t right for her anymore.
“No longer numbing myself with smoking, drinking and too much work, I was becoming more and more aware of things that I’d chosen not to look at,” she wrote, as reported in her interview with Porter magazine. “Was I alone in wanting to do some serious soul-searching while [DiCaprio] stayed the same? In the end, unfortunately, the answer was yes.”
On the day of her book release, Bündchen opened up to ABC News anchor Robin Roberts about the breaking point when she realized she had to make these changes. Similarly, she told Porter in an interview published on Friday, “When I was going through my panic attacks, I didn’t even feel like I could share with anyone. I thought maybe I don’t have the right, everybody is going through so many difficult things in the world, and I don’t have the right to feel this way. So I’d suppress it, and the more I suppressed it, the bigger it became.”
Bündchen’s experience just goes to show that no matter how successful someone seems to be, we can never know all of what’s going on behind the scenes.
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