Beyond bold: Bella Hadid opens up about health struggles, happiness and everything in between

Supermodel shared how she felt insecure and 'ugly' growing up as brunette alongside her sister, Gigi Hadid

She may be every girl’s idol today but she has certainly seen some of the darkest slumps in her 25 years. Supermodel Bella Hadid sat for a heart-to-heart with Vogue magazine recently and opened up about some of the gloomiest phases of her professional and personal life. From health struggles to cosmetic surgery and everything in between, Bella, brimming with positivity even now, spoke about how she came out stronger and happier with every passing hurdle. 

When Bella was 14, she had a nose job. It’s a decision she regrets. “I wish I had kept the nose of my ancestors,” she says. “I think I would have grown into it.” She has been accused of visiting a plastic surgeon with photographs of Carla Bruni, the supermodel and former French first lady to whom she has often been compared. She has been accused of getting her eyes lifted, her jaw shaved, her lips filled. However, she clarifies that none of this is true. “People think I fully fucked with my face because of one picture of me as a teenager looking puffy. I’m pretty sure you don’t look the same now as you did at 13, right? I have never used filler. Let’s just put an end to that. I have no issue with it, but it’s not for me.”

She then opened up about how she was often compared to her elder sibling and supermodel Gigi Hadi, all the way from their physical appearances to personalities and sociable behaviours. “I was the uglier sister. I was the brunette. I wasn’t as cool as Gigi, not as outgoing,” she mentions. “That’s really what people said about me. And unfortunately, when you get told things so many times, you do just believe it. I always ask myself, how did a girl with incredible insecurities, anxiety, depression, body-image issues, eating issues, who hates to be touched, who has intense social anxiety — what was I doing getting into this business? But over the years I became a good actor. I put on a very smiley face or a very strong face. I always felt like I had something to prove. People can say anything about how I look, about how I talk, about how I act. But in seven years I never missed a job, cancelled a job or was too late to a job. No one can ever say that I don’t work my ass off.”

Bella understands that there are those who believe she exploited a privileged upbringing into a career in fashion, whilst also riding on the popularity of big sister Gigi. And so, for years she never opened up to her colleagues about the depression, anxiety, and Lyme disease, along with the physical and cognitive symptoms she would often feel but suppress in order for no one to notice. She blames a habit of people-pleasing but does not let the fashion world, possessed of what she views as a “don’t ask don’t tell” attitude about mental health, off the hook. “For three years while I was working, I would wake up every morning hysterical, in tears, alone,” she recalls. “I wouldn’t show anybody that. I would go to work, cry at lunch in my little greenroom, finish my day, go to whatever random little hotel I was in for the night, cry again, wake up in the morning, and do the same thing.”

 

Her health struggles date back to when she was in the eighth grade. Bella began having a mix of physical and psychiatric symptoms, including brain fog, anxiety, exhaustion, poor focus, headaches, bone pain, and crying spells — some of which may have emanated from Lyme disease, from which her mother and brother also suffer. She has also been diagnosed with babesiosis, a tick-borne parasitic infection of red blood cells that sometimes co-occurs with Lyme.

When Bella was in high school, a psychiatrist prescribed extended-release Adderall for her inattention, thinking it might simply be ADHD. She says that the appetite-suppressant effect of stimulant medication pushed her into anorexia. “I was on this calorie-counting app, which was like the devil to me,” she remembers. “I’d pack my little lunch with my three raspberries, my celery stick. I was just trying, I realize now, to feel in control of myself when I felt so out of control of everything else.” These days Bella has a very healthy relationship with food, but she says the dysmorphic feelings persist. “I can barely look in the mirror to this day because of that period in my life,” she admits.

In January 2021, Bella had what she calls burnout. Her mood changed. She wasn’t herself. “My immediate trauma response is people-pleasing,” she explains. “It literally makes me sick to my stomach if I leave somewhere and someone is unhappy with me, so I always go above and beyond, but the issue with that is that I get home and I don’t have enough for myself. I became manic. I bleached my hair. I looked like a troll doll. Then I dyed it—it looked like a sunrise. That should have been the first sign.”

Under a great deal of professional pressure and after weeks of waking up in nearly suicidal despair, she spent two and a half weeks at a treatment program in Tennessee. She added the two mainstays of Western psychiatry, talk therapy and medication, to her otherwise holistic regimen. These have changed her life. “For so long, I didn’t know what I was crying about. I always felt so lucky, and that would get me even more down on myself. There were people online saying, ‘You live this amazing life. So then how can I complain?’ I always felt that I didn’t have the right to complain, which meant that I didn’t have the right to get help, which was my first problem.”

She concludes, “So now everything that I do in my personal life is literally to make sure that my mental state stays above water. Fashion can make you or break you. And if it makes you, you have to make a conscious effort every day for it not to break you. There’s always a bit of grief in love.”

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