The former WWE star Kaitlyn(now Celeste Bonin) previously signed with WWE in 2010. She was declared the winner of the all-female third season of NXT and won her first Divas Championship on the January 14, 2013 edition of Monday Night RAW. She retired from pro wrestling in 2014.
Bonin returned to the business in 2018 and has been making sporadic appearances for different independent promotions ever since her return but not WWE. She recently recalled her stint with WWE and how she decided to hang up the boots.
Kaitlyn reveals what led to her WWE release
Kaitlyn recently appeared on The Sessions with Renée Paquette to talk about her time in the WWE, her decision to retire from wrestling, real-life struggles, and the path to self-discovery. In the end, Kaitlyn’s time in WWE “f*cked” her up a bit.
Here is what she said:
“My time in WWE, it would be easy to say it f*cked me up 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 [2018 Mae Young Classic]. That was such a big deal to me because I literally didn’t know how to process it.
“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 shit and the things I went through and was struggling with during my time there.
“Also, the really 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 all of it showed me and reflected to me things that already existed in me, pain that already existed in me.
She spoke about the journey in WWE and how she ended up gaining weight. She also spoke about how she felt underconfident in WWE and was also not in a right place mentally:
“I left wrestling because I thought I was just gonna get fired. I felt less and less relevant. I had so much shame I had gained all this weight, and like my body was just giving me every signal that I was not okay, emotionally, mentally.
“I had so much hatred for myself, I had so much resentment for myself and like that projected outwards towards others. I was in self-destruct mode, so I just asked for my release on a day that was a really shitty day.”
