Trigger warning: This article deals with mental health issues, abortion and miscarriage, which could be triggering for some readers
Darius Boyd will make himself vulnerable to the country this year when he competes on SAS Australia – a show known for stripping back the layers of the celebrities we know, and shedding light on their toughest times.
WATCH BELOW: Darius and Kayla Boyd share sweet snap of baby girl
And Darius’s life has been far from easy. The NRL fullback was born to and raised by a single mother and his grandmother, and has never had a relationship with his father.
At 17, he was selected to play fullback in the Australian Schoolboys NRL team, and was drafted to the Brisbane Broncos as just 18.
As his career progressed, Darius began to face a range of challenges when it came to his mental health, but his wife, Kayla, whom he met in a nightclub in 2010 when he was just 22, has been an ongoing source of support in his life.
Kayla and Darius married in 2012, but just two years in, they would begin to face some really intense struggles.
Darius began sleeping with other people prior to a breakdown in 2014, which saw him walk from the NRL and into a private psychiatric hospital.
He and Kayla briefly separated in the aftermath.
“I’d just had enough, I was 100 per cent done,” she told Channel Nine in 2017.
However, her willingness to help Darius with his mental health saw them resolve their issues and come out stronger.
“I ended up meeting up with him and he looked so sick,” Kayla said in the same chat with Nine.
“He just looked drained and exhausted, he hadn’t been eating, he hadn’t been sleeping, and it was like so scary,” she said.
With Kayla’s eventual support, Darius was able to work on his depression and ultimately return to the NRL in 2015.
In the time since, Kayla has remained open about the struggles in her marriage, claiming she doesn’t want anyone to think it’s perfect.
She wrote an excerpt for Darius’s book, Battling the Blues, where she addressed the tough times they had faced as a couple.
“When I think of our marriage, I feel empowered and proud. There were times when I felt ashamed and embarrassed. But you have to be completely transparent with each other if you want to move forward. And we have done that,” she penned.
“If we could do our relationship all over again, would we change anything?
“Darius and I have spoken about that a lot and the answer we keep coming back to is ‘no’ – we wouldn’t change a thing. Everything has happened for a reason.”
Although the couple were able to heal, they have faced other challenges along their path.
Kayla and Darius terminated a pregnancy in 2016, not long after Kayla had miscarried her second pregnancy, a decision Kayla wrote about on her blog, leading to brutal backlash.
Kayla spoke out about the intense cyber-bullying the following year.
“I got called a murderer, a killer, ‘I don’t deserve to have the gift of life’,” Kayla recounted.
“People wished that I’d never fall pregnant again, [said] that I don’t even deserve to have Willow in my life, because she deserves to have a mother who loves her more than they love themselves.”
Despite this hardship, and the ones that came before, Kayla and Darius are coming up to 10 years of marriage together, and share three daughters: Willow, Romi, and Gia.
Willow was born in 2015, with Romi coming along four years later in 2019. They gave birth to Gia last year, in March.
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If you or someone you know has been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, help is always available. Call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or visit their website.
This article first appeared on our sister site, WHO.
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