Finding Inner Beauty Beyond Social Media

Hello everyone, I'm Jamie Lang and this is Great Moments. Hello everyone, this is Great Moments where I share some of my favorite moments from my conversations on great Company. Something that's made me think, made me laugh, or changed my perspective, and hopefully, hopefully there's something in it for you too. So are you ready? Let's get into it . You grew up in Islington, right? And then you moved to Essex. Okay. And then what was that like growing up there? What was school like? Tough. This is when uh things changed. I went in very year six I went into I remember having a very long skirt in primary school. Um my name was very obviously foreign at the time, Ekin Sue, Juju Lola, very long. And it was a very sort of like it wasn't a multicultural school. Because when I went to school in Tottenham, it was, you know, different, you know, backgrounds and stuff. So I went from that to going to literally me and everyone basically I felt like an alien and almost like I had these I had quite hairy legs at the time. You were only a young, you know, a child. And then you had all the other girls with Prada bags and Prada shoes and fake tan and mascara on and I'm like, wow, like that I idolized that, but I was never fitting in that. I was kind of the dork, I guess. Teacher's pet at school. Yeah. I loved the teachers. Yeah. And um I used to e myat my school lunch in the toilets a lot. Um then the extreme bullying bullying happened from year seven to year nine. How old are you at that point ? Uh twelve, thirteen. Yeah. I was quite big when I was near seven, chubby . Um, got pushed down the stairs, being caught fat, being called ugly, racism. Um yeah, had a quite a tough time at sch Yeah. I I chatted to um Luke Evans, the actor. Amazing. So he 's amazing. He grew up in Wales and he was really badly bullied. And he said, he had a mentality though. He said, um, he he knew it was gonna end. He said, It's if I get through school, it's gonna stop. It's gonna be okay. I just gotta get through this. And I said, that's a unique way. Yeah. Because lots of people don't have that. When you're in when you're in the thick of it like that, it is you're in the tornado. Yeah. It's hard. You think that your life's gonna end. You think this is what I deserve. Until I fancied a guy at school who wouldn't even look at me and I thought, you know what, I'm a bit fat here. I need to lose weight. So I Googled how to lose weight. Some stupid diet came up called the green apple diet, right? You're young, you're a kid at this point. How can you know, morning, afternoon, night, I was just munching on this apple and skipping rope. Are you serious? Yeah. I obviously you couldn't afford a gym at the time you were a child, but like didn't have iPhones then. Oh did we? I can't remember. And um yeah, and I lost weight and all of a sudden people started looking at me and and fancying me. And then I did the beauty pageant after that, which was wild because I was like 17, I went to South Korea. I know, to compete. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hang on a second. So much the same. Oh my god. This is so you're at school, you're having this really tricky time. You're saying there's racism, you're being pushed down the stairs. Are you telling your parents about that? No. You're not. Because my mum was pregnant to my brother at the time. I didn't want to stress them out. Um so you turnalised everything. Yeah. And actually my best friend, funny enough, was chocolate. I used to eat a lot as comfort. I would snack a lot because I felt happiness and comforting. Yeah. It was like a weird bond we had. So you then go on the start, you start eating eating apples, you're skipping. Very unhealthy. Yeah. And I suppose that maybe came and I don't want to put words you have though, it probably became a bit of an obsession maybe with Well 100%. And that's when I started to become obsessed with what I looked like. So it was like, okay, what is the meaning of beauty? Okay, m itust be the way I look. Actually, it's internal, it's about how you are, your soul. But I learned that later on in life. So these pageants that I did were very all about what you look like. The perfect person. Beauty. Very wrong message, by the way. But when you're young, unfortunately, I got influenced by that. So you saw this pageant, you thought this is what I want to do. Because I thought I needed the confidence where I lost it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I didn't know who I was , but I liked the attention I got. So I thought let me go into this. And then somehow won the pageant in in England and then went to South Korea for Miss Asia Ps uh Pacific 2020 twelve and became 15th out of 75 countries represented Ireland. Although I'm not Irish, I don't know why I did that, because I had to represent something from the UK, which is Northern Ireland. Um yeah, um, interesting times. And so you and so you represented Miss Island. I don't even look Irish, but I don't. Oh no I'm really there's two things here I would say. Firstly , um uh it's it's very entrepreneurial of you in certain ways because you knew what you wanted to get. We all lie about different things. It's not really lying, you just knew what you wanted to get. But also you're going into this it's also about competition and it's about holding yourself. That d demands a lot of confidence. Yes. So going from someone who was lacking that confidence to then getting confidence to go and do that, that's a massive shift. It is. And I don't understand how that h appened. It was like almost like I wanted to compete. I wanted to be better. So I was like you know, there was a talent show in actually one of the pageants and I was singing in it. So all of a sudden this confidence came out and my performative side again came out. And that's when I think confidence happened at such a young age. And it went on forever. Almost like I've done the bullies. If I can do the bullies, come at me, what's the worst that can happen in life. What would you say to someone listening who's going through something like that? I would say please speak to someone, whether that's a teacher, a friend or someone, don't bottle it in. And I would definitely say that it's gonna make you a stronger person . And those bullies at school are gonna end up below you . Cause that is what happened. And I'm gonna definitely say that it's gonna pass and never hold everything in and if anyone needs help, seek help, therapy, whatever it needs, even if you're you know young person, there's always help out there, free help. There's loads of websites that you can talk to someone too. Have you ever seen any of the bullies again? Yeah. Oh hundred percent. I didn't e they didn't deserve my my uh blink. I saw them on the high street. One of them looked absolutely ridiculous. Honestly, like literally did this. I was like and one of them was like, Can I have a picture of you? I went, Do I know you? Oh, you're the you're that guy from school. And I just passed and I walked off and I was like, Yeah, it was the best feeling ever, Jamie. It was when I won Love Island in 2022. And uh felt good . I um I chatted to and I'm sure she went when we said a Scarlett Moffat. Okay. Who is amazing and and I w I haven't seen her in a few years, but I was friendly with her, and she said one of the most empowering moments for her ever , she was in a supermarket and she saw one of her bullies, and she and she went straight back into being this little girl, like scared, like, oh my god freaking out oh my god there she is and the bully ran up to her and she was with her daughter and she said oh my god Scarlett I haven't seen you since school you're doing so well all these kind of things. Yeah. And she said, Oh, I've been telling my little daughter how we were best friends at school. And Scarlett said she sort of said she said, Oh, can I have a photo? She said, Um, I want to say one thing to you. I hope your little girl never goes through what you made me feel at school. And she dropped her basket and walked out the supermarket and she had never felt more alive than she had confronted her bully. Yeah. Unbelievable that's giving me goosebumps. Good for her for saying that. Yeah, because it is. Brilliant. That's all you need to say and walk off. Because I think this with especially with something like um bullying, it's such a firstly it's so awful. It's horrendous to do that to people. It's such a short-term sort of thing to do to someone. People it people don't realize that in later life you're gonna see each other or walk past each other. The world is small. The world is small. And be nice to everyone on the way out because you never know who you meet on the way down. Never ever step on the little people. Never be rude. Never bully. Never do anything like that. Because you'll meet them in the future. And like you did, you'll flick your hair and walk on. Exactly. And you know what, Jamie, I never understand bullying at a young age. I understand bullies as an adult. I feel like it's a reflection of who they are because they hate themselves. So they want to make you feel bad. But I feel like when you're young, when you're not fully developed, how are you a but like I don't understand what goes through that child's mind? How can you be nasty to someone? Is it bad parenting ? Is that a question? It just do you know what I mean? I've always thought about it. I think it's I think it's probably they are making themselves feel better. So they've probably gone through th some sort of trauma. 100%. Or something like that. That's what I think. The how do you stop the bullying? You can't. This is the sad thing. You can change and it you can control yourself in the situation. Because bullying happens even now, right? It happens in everyday work. There's always a manager or a boss or a colleague that just doesn't like you. But you just have to accept it. And when you know that that's life, you can move on. Even now, there's probably that people hate me for no reason. That's fine. Hate is an emotion. You gotta worry when no one has no feelings towards you, Jamie. Really? I've had hate. I've had bullying. Just love life, you know it's amazing it is mad but I prefer being real I prefer you know this the mind being the heart being beautiful than focusing on the the look, I feel like it's hard though, right? It is hard. It is so hard. It's really time. It takes a lot of time. Because it's it's and that's such a great message too, because we live in this world 'cause of social media and what we look like and things like that that we kind of forget that actually it does come from the inside. And all of the outer shell doesn't matter. Anyone can be beautiful, Jamie. Anyone. There's loads of people that are handsome, beautiful. There's someone better looking than you better looking. It's okay, but there's only one of you. But how do you change that? And be honest, because that takes that is a lot of unlearning to do. Yeah. Yeah. And that's hard. Really hard. Especially as we're talking about the industry that we're in, especially being a woman in the industry. So how does that change? When does that change for you? And be to be totally honest with me. It changes for me when you hit rock bottom and you realize how there was a moment in my life I was very depressed. And I just looked at myself and I was like, I looked at Instagram and I was like, oh, they just seemed really something didn't feel right. It looked like an illusion. I felt like I was in the in a video game. Like, what what is this? We we we take a picture, we put it on Instagram, we wait for people to like it, we edit our pictures. Why? I went to a walk in a park after and I took off my shoes and I walked barefoot on the grass. I sat there, closed my phone, just meditating, and I was like and I went back to like it was really weird, but where we came from, Adam and Eve, like for instance, we're humans, like this social media is all new. It's toxic, it's not natural. We're all living a lie , I feel like. It is. How do you know this Instagram is what is right? It's not. Living in the moment, realizing what's important, family, morals, happiness, being healthy. We we we're breathing right now. There's people in hospital that cannot breathe. They cannot they've broken a leg or an arm. We we still are here right now. But then there's someone that's moaning about the weather being rainy. Do you get it? It it takes time