Going viral usually has a lot of benefits, but when you've become viral for the wrong reasons, it might drive you to think something you never thought you could.
This was the case for Caitlin Upton, who was a Miss Teen USA contestant back in 2007, who is probably more known as an 18-year-old girl from South Carolina who badly fumbled when answering a question. E! News reports:
"When asked why some Americans couldn't identify their home country on a map, Upton stumbled and said it was because there weren't enough maps to go around... among other reasons."
The footage of her embarrassing Q&A experience quickly went viral on the Internet. Apparently, it made her suffer from a lot of bullying for years. She told New York Magazine:
"I lost a lot of close friends over it - people I'd been friends with since I was 10, people I grew up playing soccer with. One group of girls took me to this party at the University of South Carolina, and I walk in, and the entire USC baseball team surrounded me and bashed me with the harshest, meanest comments I had ever heard. [...] And somebody once put a letter in my parents' mailbox about how my body was going to be eaten alive by ants and burned in a freak fire. And then it said, in all caps, 'GO DIE CAITE UPTON, GO DIE FOR YOUR STUPIDITY.' That's the kind of stuff people would say to me for two years."
As it turned out, the unending harassment Caitlin Upton experienced took its toll. Upton revealed that she thought about killing herself, simply because she couldn't handle the bullying any further:
"I definitely went though a period where I was very, very depressed. But I never let anybody see that stuff, except for people I could trust. [...] I had some very dark moments where I thought about committing suicide. The fact that I have such an amazing family and friends, it really, really helped."
In the end, Caitlin Upton decided to dye her hair brown, hoping that she wouldn't be recognized anymore and it actually worked!
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