The singer and Chad Gilbert called it quits in 2017.
Hayley Williams struggled following her 2017 split from her husband, Chad Gilbert. In an interview with The Guardian, the 31-year-old Paramore singer reveals that she weighed just 91 pounds after her split from Gilbert, whom she had been with for a decade.
Williams only became aware her dramatic weight loss after seeing photos and videos from her promotional tour of Paramore's 2017 album, After Laughter.
"It wasn’t until I saw the pictures that I was like, there’s no hiding that I’m not OK now," she says. "And part of me enjoyed that -- if people know I’m not OK, they won’t get too close."
"What happens in our brains often manifests physically if we don’t take care of it," she adds.
Her bandmates intervened, though, and got her to start eating more. Though she didn't drink for much of her relationship with Gilbert, she began doing so while touring the album.
"[I was] looking to break free from a prison that I’d put myself in and to also forget at the same time," she says.
Despite her struggles throughout that period, Williams says she would not describe herself as depressed.
"What I hated was at the time it was still sort of new to see the word 'depression' -- it became such a hot-button word, almost clickbait? she says. "And it scared me to become part of that conversation, especially if I wasn’t even sure what was actually going on with me."
"One of my biggest healing moments was realizing that a lot of my depression was misplaced anger. I really forced it inward, on myself, and it made me feel shame all the time," she says. "It helped me understand things that happened throughout my life that weren’t right."
Prior to their split, Williams says that her and Gilbert's relationship was "very unhealthy," so much so that she wasn't even confident in the relationship on her wedding day.
"I wanted the whole thing -- the family -- and I thought I might even stop doing music for a while to do that," she says of why she went through with the marriage. "Give up the thing that’s the most precious to me? Are you kidding me?"
As for what led to their split, Williams says that Gilbert "probably looks at me like the villain."
"Throwing around my version of someone else’s story doesn’t feel fair, which is funny because I don’t necessarily think it should be fair," she says. "Especially not after the s**t I went through."
Watch the video below to see ET's most recent interview with Williams.
RELATED CONTENT:
