Opening up about her past. The Bachelorette season 9 star Emily Maynard's new book, I Said Yes: My Story of Heartbreak, Redemption and True Love, reveals details about her teenage years, during which she battled depression and even contemplated suicide.
Maynard, 30, who announced on Tuesday, March 1, that she and husband Tyler Johnson are expecting their second child, writes that her Florida-based parents sent her to boarding school in Virginia beginning in ninth grade because she had been bullied in middle school and was hoping for a fresh start. But she felt out of place on her own, particularly after she was diagnosed with Bell's palsy during her junior year.
Following an offhand comment to a counselor about wanting to die, Maynard was admitted to her local hospital's psych ward even though she hadn't seriously considered suicide. After three nights, she was determined to not be a threat to herself and was sent back to boarding school despite begging her mom to let her return home.
"Things went back to normal, my normal, rather quickly," the reality TV star writes in her book, which was released on Tuesday. "Which meant the same unsettling feelings of discontent and unease overwhelmed me again, pushing me down a deeper tunnel of confusion, loneliness and depression."
In an effort to earn attention and get sent home, she took a number of low-dose Prozac pills and woke up in the emergency room.
"I threw up so much, I filled up the commercial-grade waste basket in the corner," Maynard writes. "A doctor or nurse stuck an IV in me to replenish my body with fluids lost during my nonstop vomiting."
She adds that reflecting on this time in her life as a "depressed teenager" is "wild. A part of me almost feels I'm writing about someone else."
After leaving the ER and getting a return visit to the psych ward, she finally got what she wanted: The boarding school recommended that she return to her family's home near Key West.
"No one said a word," the lifestyle blogger writes of her silent four-hour ride back to Florida. "No one mentioned the pills. The emergency room. That other place. Maybe it was better that way. We could all pretend it never happened."
Maynard, who split from Jef Holm not long after their 2012 Bachelorette season ended, married Johnson in June 2014, and they welcomed son Jennings in July. She had daughter Ricki, 10, with late fiancé Ricky Hendrick, who died in a 2004 plane crash.
The Bachelor airs on ABC on Mondays at 8 p.m. EST.
