[imagesource: Vogue]

Supermodel Bella Hadid has graced the cover of American Vogue’s April issue.

In the interview, Hadid opens up about her mental health, pointing out the industry’s knack for making models go through total burnout, how she has felt largely misunderstood and isolated, and how she wishes she never got plastic surgery as a teen.

Last year, the sister of Gigi Hadid went through a particularly gruelling bout of burnout, which she needed a treatment program involving medication and therapy to get through.

CNN reports:

“There were people online saying, ‘You live this amazing life,'” she said.

“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.”

In November last year, the supermodel posted a series of crying selfies alongside a frank telling of her innermost struggles:

 

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Her “multiple childhood traumas” have caught up to her, but ultimately, it is really the pressures of working in the fashion industry that have taken the biggest toll on her self-image and happiness:

 

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So much so, that at the age of just 14, she felt the need to go under the knife and get cosmetic surgery done on her nose.

Something she says she rather regrets now:

“I wish I had kept the nose of my ancestors,” she said. “I think I would have grown into it.”

Hadid has been accused of having had numerous other procedures, the magazine wrote, but the 25-year-old denies this.

“People always have something to say, but what I have to say is, I’ve always been misunderstood in my industry and by the people around me.”

At least she now has the chance to tell that story in one of fashion’s most influential magazines.

 

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For a long time, the modelling industry has made women buckle, bend, and eventually break to fit the outrageously impossible beauty and size standards:

She told Vogue: “Finally girls are standing up about sample sizes, but when I first started seven years ago, I couldn’t fit into Saint Laurent. And I remember a stylist talking about my weight because I couldn’t zip up.

“Looking back, I think, yeah, because a Saint Laurent sample size from the runway was just not a real size for anybody. But then you think there’s something wrong with you, and no one around you is saying, no, no, you’re fine, don’t worry, it’s a small size.”

Not to mention the incessant husstle:

“I’ve had girls in my lap crying to me at four in the morning, still at fittings for a show when they have to be at another show at 7 a.m.,” she said. “Completely destroyed, hair burned off, haven’t eaten anything, exhausted to the point where they’re shaking.”

The Vogue article also reveals how Hadid’s “demeanour is her armour” and “a vital layer of protection” in a world where so many people have an (often inaccurate) opinion of her:

“The majority of the time when I meet people, they say, I just didn’t think you were going to be nice, that you were going to be this mean, scary dragon lady, or some kind of a sexbot,” she says.

“That’s just not me, and if people have a better understanding of who I am, then I feel less alone within myself.”

But that’s a big task to give yourself; controlling what everyone else thinks about you.

Then again, as adults in this harsh world, we would all be wise to harness some form of compassion when thinking, writing, and talking about the rich and famous (unless they’re being blatantly awful, of course).

At the end of the day, they’re people, people with deep, complex feelings, too.

You be you, Bella:

 

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The full Vogue read is waiting here for you.

[sources:cnn&vogue]