Bella Hadid’s recent confession proves that things aren’t always what they seem.
The 25-year-old Victoria’s Secret model is considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, plus she’s paid handsomely for that genetic blessing. Hadid has fame, fortune, and good looks, but according to a Wall Street Journal article, she’s been suffering on the inside.
Specifically, the magazine cover model said she had hang-ups about her appearance while she wasn’t walking runways, and hadn’t employed a personal stylist “in a long time.”
Hadid explained how she was “in such a weird place mentally” making it difficult for her “to get out of the house and put an outfit together, especially with the anxiety of [photographers] being outside and all of that.”
She said, “In the last year, it was really important for me to learn that even if people talk about my style or if they like it or if they don’t, it doesn’t matter, because it’s my style. When I leave the house in the morning, what I think about is: Does this make me happy? Do I feel good in this and do I feel comfortable?”
Hadid had previously spoken about anxiety issues on her social media page. Currently, she has 48.5 million followers on Instagram.
In September, the model explained, “My social anxiety was something that slowly crept up on me as I grew into my twenties,” she wrote at the time. “It got harder for me to go out without having one drink to calm my nerves, which made me not want to go out at all, so I was just hibernating between jobs.”
She continued, “With a life that is constantly pushing a social regime, along with working 13 hour days, every single day, I knew this wasn’t a sustainable life for me.”
Hadid also told WSJ why she decided to post selfies of her crying and expressing extreme emotion.
“I would have really depressive episodes and my mom or my doctor would ask how I was and instead of having to respond in text, I would just send them a photo,” she told the publication. “It was the easiest thing for me to do at the time because I was never able to explain how I was feeling.”
“I would just be in excruciating and debilitating mental and physical pain, and I didn’t know why. That was over the past three years,” she continued. And she was trying to normalize these types of feelings, “to make sure that anybody that was feeling that way knew it was OK to feel that way.”
Like so many other celebrities and influencers on Instagram, the Chanel model promises that the perfect image she projects is not based in reality.
“I felt like it was just good for me to be able to speak my truth,” she told WSJ. “And at some point I wasn’t able to post nice pretty pictures anymore. I was over it.”
Hadid says she’s just like the rest of us with a life of both beauty and pain.