My first BMX. I fell off at least 20 times in the first week learning to do wheelies… But I always got back on!

      I always joke with my friends now that it’s a good job social media wasn’t around when we were at school. I didn’t have that extraordinary pressure young people face now to look a certain way. I remember the first moment I ever felt truly insecure about how I looked: when we shot a Hollyoaks calendar in Ibiza when I was 17, I was with beautiful women who were two or three years older than me, were quite slim and also more physically developed, like the lovely Sarah Dunn who played Mandy, and Elize du Toit who played Izzy. When I saw the photos I thought, ‘Oh gosh, I don’t look like these other girls. I look heavier, my roots are quite bad, and my nails are all bitten’. They’d all had manicures and pedicures and their hair done, but, because I was young, I thought that’s just how they looked all the time. It didn’t occur to me that they had got their hair and nails done specially. It was the first time I really questioned my appearance.

      Earlier that year, in April 2002, my dad passed away. It was, and still is, the single biggest thing that’s ever happened to me in my life and it hit me massively hard. While I didn’t go off the rails as such, I did stop looking after myself a bit. I’d think nothing of going out and sinking five shots of vodka of an evening. My friends and I would go out on Friday and Saturday nights drinking, have a McDonald’s on the Saturday and a Chinese takeaway on the Sunday. None of us would ever think, ‘I’m going to feel like crap tomorrow,’ or ‘We’re going to get fat’. We just did it. It’s only when I look back now that I realise, ‘that’s why my face was puffy, my skin used to break out, and why I didn’t sleep very well. I mean, we used to get a flight to Magaluf on a Friday, come back on Sunday and then head straight to work on the Monday. We weren’t on our phones trying to get our best angles to upload to Instagram, we just let ourselves be and we needed that. I needed that. That whole period was full of laughter and love.

      But it all took its toll, meaning I definitely didn’t look my best when shooting that Hollyoaks calendar. It was, I think, my very first insight into what social media is now – being forced to compare myself to other women. I spent that whole week in Ibiza thinking, ‘This is so embarrassing. I look chubby, young and stupid.’ I even wondered if the press people would regret me being in it. Then, when it came to promotion, the agency said to me, ‘The Daily Star, The Sun and The Mirror all want to use your shot to advertise the calendar.’ My photo – out of all of them. I couldn’t believe it. Many of the papers did use my photo. Then, off the back of that, the agency said, ‘The response has been great. We want you to do your own calendar.’ So I shot my own, the whole time thinking, ‘Is anyone actually going to buy this?’ But then the lads’ mags picked up on it and it basically kick-started my modelling career. Which just goes to show, you know? I spent an entire week – and all the lead-up to the calendar being released – panicking about it. Panicking that I didn’t look right, that I was too big and un-groomed, too much of a tomboy; that I didn’t look like everyone else. Yet off the back of that I ended up shooting five or six of my own calendars. Something great came from a week of stressing over something that was all in my own head. It taught me that we never know the full story, that we can look at an Instagram post and think, ‘Oh, look at her with her perfect life’, not realising she’s spent the day doubled over with anxiety about something or other.