For more than twenty years, Gisele Bündchen has been one of the highest-paid models on the entire planet. The recognition not only came on an economic level, but the Brazilian became a reference for her colleagues and a global icon. She even dabbled in the world of acting, although she has always been focused on modeling.
Despite decades of success, Bündchen has also gone through tough times in her career. Her level of demand was so great that the Brazilian has admitted that she had strong anxiety attacks and that she even thought about suicide.
"You know, I was in a tunnel. I couldn't breathe. And then I started being in the studios and I felt like I was suffocating," she explains in an interview for the CBS News Sunday Morning program.
Bündchen has had to learn to deal with extreme situations: "I lived on the ninth floor and I had to go up the stairs because I was afraid of getting stuck in the elevator and hyperventilating... You know when you can't breathe even when the windows are open. You feel like you don't want to live like that, you know what I mean?"
"Did you really think about jumping?" the presenter asked. "Yes. For a second," responded the model, who thus acknowledged that she had had suicidal thoughts during her successful career.
After decades on the catwalks, the Brazilian wants people to see her "as she really is", an image far from perfection. "I just think that now I'm allowing myself to come out as Gisele and not as 'her,'" she maintains in the interview. And she concludes: "I don't have to play a character. I can be me. And that's liberating."
