“People think I got all this surgery or did this or that,” Hadid told InStyle. “And you know what? We can do a scan of my face, darling. I’m scared of putting fillers into my lips. I wouldn’t want to mess up my face.”
While she feels comfortable in her own skin these days, she didn’t always feel that way. “People think I’m very confident, but I really had to learn how to be,” she revealed.
One example of how she overcame her insecurities was as a teen when she described herself as having “big hips and was kind of chubby” and was even bullied over her “weird face.”
And to this day, she still struggles with the impact of haters and hurtful comments online. “It’s taken me a long time to learn not to listen,” she said about strangers’ negative comments, saying that she wants to personally reach out to each of them to “be there for them” because “there’s obviously something deeper going on.”
“We all have our stuff to overcome, and that’s what I want to preach to the kids these days. I went through a serious depression last year, and I think it stemmed from when I was younger and [being bullied by] the kids in school,” she shared. “And now, I guess I shouldn’t be as self-conscious—people tell me that every day—but it’s a personal thing. We all go through it because we’re human.”
Earlier this year she revealed to PEOPLE that what “deeply” hurts her most about negativity online is when commenters attack her personality, which happened in April when someone left a negative comment about Hadid and Kendall Jenner’s appearance and personality.
“At the end of the day I don’t want to mean, and I don’t want to ‘clap back,'” she said about her response to the online bully. “We’re all just human beings and it wasn’t even about what they said about our faces, it was just that — don’t attack my personality because you don’t know me. That’s what deeply hurts me.”
This article originally appeared on PEOPLE.
