NXT star Tommaso Ciampa has opened up on his struggles with mental health and how it almost led to the taking of his own life.
The 34-year-old, who wants to be a mainstay on the black and yellow brand, recently threatened to quit WWE if he got a push to the main roster.
Ciampa was a recent guest on Lilian Garcia's Chasing Glory podcast and revealed that his getting dropped from Ohio Valley Wrestling many years ago left him in a depressed state. The wrestler says he worked as a server at a TGI Fridays after he was released and an injured knee did not make the situation any better. He soon found himself taking pills and claims that he didn't even know what he was ingesting most of the time.
A failed attempt at suicide gave Ciampa a new lease on life and, fortunately, he's stuck around long enough to become the man we know today. The NXT performer disclosed having tried to take his own life via the reverse exhaust procedure, so to speak, but was unsuccessful as the police were made aware of what was happening before he ended up dying.
“I lost a lot of myself," he recalled. "I’m just in a bad place, and I remember hitting this, I have bad thoughts but I wouldn’t act on them or anything. I do remember a time where, my attempted suicide was reversing the exhaust in the car, and the worst part to this day to me about it is, so my sister had an ex-boyfriend who years after they broke up, committed suicide, and that is how he did it.
"I knew it was possible from that. To this day, it eats at me in a different way. It doesn’t eat at me in a way like, I’m really good at the past is the past, I live in the moment. It’s just one of those things like, goddamn, I can’t fathom my sister then hearing, I can’t even fathom what went through her mind. But that’s how I attempted it.”
It's A Never-Ending Fight
Ciampa, who now has a lovely family that surely helps keep him grounded, says an off-shift security guard was the one who noticed his car parked in a lot around 2-3 AM one morning and called the cops, who found him passed out.
Things could have turned out very differently had it not been for that security guard and he's still not completely over his depression. He explained that it's something he has to deal with every day but can handle it a lot better as he uses exercise and other physical activity to steady himself.
Of course, there was not much he could do after neck surgery earlier this year but an app called Calm made things a lot easier then. You could listen to the podcast in its entirety right here.
Source: 411Mania (transcription)