Tess Holliday Quotes

Telling my story has not been easy for me. I've had to dredge up memories I would have rather forgotten. The lonely, anxiety-ridden months I avoided others, attempting to hide from interrogations about my social life.

I had a really hard time when I was 16, 17, 18. I started with the eating disorder in high school.

School was unbelievably painful. It was five years of being pretty sad.

People think it must be wonderful being in movies or on television, but it can be very tough on a child. I had two friends in elementary school. That was it. There was a clique of girls that were brutal to me. They pulled some very mean stuff. My two friends got me through it. Without them, I would have been all alone.

The thing with Kerry is that all of this is a natural progression, her troubles. It's a cycle.

But when alcohol comes in, start running. Because there's a demon there, and it goes back to her childhood.

I'm always wearing Spanx, eating ice cream and feeling a bit lonely.

I'd dropped out of high school without really doing it on purpose - I'd just go home at lunch 'cos I didn't have friends, then stay there all afternoon listening to rap. It got to the point where I wouldn't have passed even if I'd gone back. I was depressed, basically.

I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book.

I know from my own personal experience. I was bullied in middle school and high school and went through my fair share of hard times thereafter. Also, one of my really good friends committed suicide when I was in high school.

Girls' inner critics are starting to reveal themselves at a younger and younger age. And body image issues are an aspect of their lives which is causing them low self esteem and day-to-day suffering.

In general, I prefer to record all traumas and save them for later, playing them over and over so they can haunt me for a disproportionate number of weeks to come. It's very healthy.

I've been actually really very pleased to see how much awareness was raised around bullying, and how deeply it affects everyone. You know, you don't have to be the loser kid in high school to be bullied. Bullying and being picked on comes in so many different forms.

In high school, I was very unpopular.

This little kid pointed at me and said, 'You look disgusting!' That was the first time I thought maybe I did. I decided I'd better start eating. I'm just thankful that I made it through with relatively few scars.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

For me, the bulimia was about stuffing my emotions. So I stopped suppressing my feelings.

I had a hard time with bullying. I ate lunch in the bathroom.

When I was Surgeon General, I spent a lot of time talking to people in living rooms and town halls all across the country, and one of the things I started to notice was that behind many of the stories of addiction, violence, depression and anxiety were threads of loneliness.

Being singled out as 'The Ugly One' led to depression.

Growing up in the '80s in central New Jersey as a weird kid with a blue mohawk listening to the Sex Pistols and dressing really funky, I was bullied pretty badly. It was every single day in elementary school and kept going into middle school, too. I felt totally alone, without a single person there for me.

In my early days depression did inhibit me because I was too debilitated and terrified to tell anyone why I couldn't get on a train from Manchester for auditions in London.

I didn't have no friends or nothing; I was a nerdy kid.

When you don't have a support system, and you're constantly being bullied for who you are, and you begin to not accept yourself for who you are, it's a distraction from schoolwork. It's a distraction from learning and from growing.

I wasn't popular in high school; I had no friends.