On Tuesday’s episode of The MMA Hour, reality television star turned MMA fighter, Aaron Chalmers, candidly revealed that his management team ran his Twitter profile.
“The Joker” improved to 4-0 in his promotional debut at Bellator 200 last Friday. As with all of his fights to date, his winning performance provoked a lot of reaction online. However, having reached celebrity status for his part in MTV’s Geordie Shore before transitioning to MMA, Chalmers makes sure he bypasses comments from online trolls by allowing other people to oversee his Twitter feed for him.
“Two years ago, there was a stage where I couldn’t leave the house with my anxiety. To walk out in front of 8,000 people at Bellator, that’s an achievement in itself,” Chalmers told Ariel Helwani.
“No one really knows the struggles that other people are going through. For me, to get to the point where I can’t leave the house because of anxiety to walking out and doing that, that’s a huge achievement. But no one sees that. They just say, ‘Oh, he’s fighting for Bellator… he’s f*ckin’ this and that’. But like I say, in two years I’ve gone from a really dark place to on top of the world. If someone told me two years ago that I’d be walking out in front of people and having a fight, I would’ve said, ‘No way’.”
Chalmers recalled how his fame lead him down a dark path two years ago.
“I was on a big television show and when you have a big platform you’re just a target for abuse. You put yourself in the limelight. I would get one bad comment and 20 good, but I would always focus on the bad. At the time, the way I got around things was to drink, so I drank every night and that made the anxiety worse — it was a never-ending circle,” he explained.
“Eventually, I started seeing a therapist and speaking about it was the best thing I ever done. Fast forward two years, [I’ve gone] from sitting in my room not able to leave to walking out in front of Bellator in front of millions and I loved every minute of it.”
After overcoming his anxiety, Chalmers says he walks into every room like he owns it.
“Not at all,” he replied when asked if he still struggled with anxiety.
“Once someone told me, ‘Wherever you go walk in like you own the place’ — that’s why I walked in the Bellator cage like I owned the whole place. Wherever I go now, I enjoy it. Even people booing, normally it would annoy me but I enjoy it. Every place that I walk into now, I walk into it like I own it, that’s always stuck in my head.”
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