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‘Fixer Upper’ Star Chip Gaines Opens Up About His Struggles With Depression

By Lawrence Arboleda
Published on: 07:12 PST, Oct 13, 2017

Fixer Upper star Chip Gaines has opened up about his struggles with depression in his new memoir, Capital Gaines: Smart Things I Learned Doing Stupid Stuff. As reported by Radar Online, Mr. Gaines felt devastated when he was cut from Baylor University’s team during his sophomore year. He writes in his memoir that it had been his dream to play professional baseball, and to be cut from the team hit him “like a sucker punch to the gut.”

“And in the following months, I fell into something I can only describe as a deep depression,” Gaines wrote.

“The only dream I’d ever had was crushed,” he said. “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,” Chip continued. “And when that dream was lost, I was lost too.”

For some time, Chip Gaines spent most of his days holed up in his dorm room to wallow in self-pity, believing that he has no other purpose in life other than to play baseball. Realizing that his self-pity can only take him so far, Gaines eventually snapped out of it.

Before long, Chip and his wife, Joanna Gaines, went on to become successful entrepreneurs after they opened Magnolia Market together.

Their road to success wasn’t easy. As reported by the Daily Mail, the couple could barely make ends meet before they made plans about starring on a TV show together.

But while the couple achieved overwhelming success through their HGTV show, Chip Gaines had difficulty dealing with the arduous filming schedule. It only made matters worse when he became a Twitter addict. His addiction to the social media platform was such that one tweet from a person he barely knows was enough to ruin his entire day.

“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.”

Chip Gaines recalled in his memoir that one time when he broke down after a customer tweeted him at 3 a.m. complaining about having not received his Magnolia online order.

“I was up all night dwelling on it,” he said. “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?”

Not long after that, he decided to end the show.

He and wife announced that Season 5 will be Fixer Upper’s last in a joint blog post published on September 26.

“It is with both sadness and expectation that we share the news that Season 5 of Fixer Upper will be our last,” the couple wrote. “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.”

The sudden ending of Fixer Upper is expected to deal a huge blow to HGTV ratings-wise. Chip and Joanna Gaines’ show was the network’s highest-rated program, followed by Flip or Flop. The show’s spin-off show, Behind the Design, is still expected to air this year shortly after the Season 5 premiere of the original show.

[Featured Image by Brian Ach/AP Images]

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