Whitney Way Thore’s many fans may be excited to watch the new season of her hit show My Big Fat Fabulous Life, but the TLC star is more “stressed” than ever to see her difficult 2020 unfold again on-screen.
On top of living through a global pandemic, Thore dealt with an explosion in her personal life after learning that her fiancé, Chase Severino, had cheated on her with another woman who became pregnant with his child. The last six months, Thore tells PEOPLE, “have been the hardest period of my life that I can remember.”
“I think this is going to be the most stressful, and the worst I will hopefully ever feel before a premiere,” she says. “I’ve had six, almost seven months to get past this and move forward, and now to see it on TV is not ideal. I’m ready for it to start, though, because the sooner it starts the sooner it’ll be over.”
This seventh season begins when Thore is still with Severino and “didn’t know that any of this was going to happen,” she says. They were together but living in different cities, and once the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March they were unable to see each other. Thore learned of Severino’s infidelity in April, over the phone.
“For about five months, I was just a disaster,” she says. “I was crying every day. I had Buddy with me, and I honestly couldn't function without him. He fed me every day. He did my laundry, walked my dog, fed my animals. I mean, just literally did everything for me.”
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Thore says that in the last two months, she’s started to feel better. She moved back to Greensboro from Charlotte, started her workout program NoBS Active with a new partner and bas “been able to kind of pick up the pieces.” She’s “stressed,” though, about the new season.
“If it wasn't on TV, I think I'd be on a really positive trajectory, but this is kind of a setback, emotionally, to have to see it,” she says. “I feel like that's going to be as painful to watch as the aftermath of it happening; to see myself happy and then to see myself devastated.”
Thore is also worried about the continued hate that her fans are sending to Severino. She asked her followers on Instagram to stop harassing him in a post on Oct. 26, but says that it has continued anyway.
“I don’t want him to get that,” she says. “People think they're doing that for me, and I just hate it. It's just negativity that nobody needs to see, honestly, and when I'm trying to move forward, it just literally makes it harder for me.”
Thore says that she’s been able to get some closure in the last few months, in part from meeting up with Severino in person and from learning that his baby arrived.
“It wasn’t easy for me, but I can objectively feel happiness for him,” she says. “And I think that means that I’ve healed a lot.”
And though Thore was hard-pressed to think of something she’s looking forward to on this season, she does hope that her difficult year can help someone else through one of their own.
“For me, the reason that I do this show is to have representation and have people be able to see themselves in me and to see their families in my family and their experiences in my experience,” she says. “I think in that way, maybe it could be helpful for people who are also struggling and not really knowing what's going on in their life.”
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