Bella Hadid is getting real about her struggle with mental health. In her new Vogue cover, the model got candid about the ongoing challenges she faces daily and her ability to mask them with her professionalism, despite knowing that hiding her issues isn’t the healthiest option.

“For three years while I was working, I would wake up every morning hysterical, in tears, alone,” she said in the publication’s April issue. “I wouldn’t show anybody that. I would go to work, cry at lunch in my little greenroom, finish my day, go to whatever random little H๏τel I was in for the night, cry again, wake up in the morning, and do the same thing.”

But her battle with mental health didn’t just start when she got into fashion — it’s something she has faced her entire life. In fact, she tells Vogue that in eighth grade, she started suffering from brain fog, anxiety, exhaustion, poor focus, headaches, bone pain, and crying spells, probably due to her diagnosis with Lyme disease.

And while modeling wasn’t the cause of her mental and emotional woes, never-ending comparisons to others, including her older sister Gigi Hadid — not to mention a rigorous work schedule (the style icon just wrapped a very busy fashion month) — certainly exacerbated it.

“I was the uglier sister. I was the brunette. I wasn’t as cool as Gigi, not as outgoing,” she said. “That’s really what people said about me. And unfortunately when you get told things so many times, you do just believe it. I always ask myself, how did a girl with incredible insecurities, anxiety, depression, body-image issues, eating issues, who hates to be touched, who has intense social anxiety — what was I doing getting into this business? But over the years I became a good actress. I put on a very smiley face, or a very strong face. I always felt like I had something to prove. People can say anything about how I look, about how I talk, about how I act. But in seven years I never missed a job, canceled a job, was late to a job. No one can ever say that I don’t work my ᴀss off.”

Another common misconception about Bella is that she’s undergone the knife, receiving cosmetic surgery to enhance her features and create the angelic face we see now. But the model cleared up those years of rumors saying the only procedure she’s had done is a nose job.

“I wish I had kept the nose of my ancestors,” she said. “I think I would have grown into it. People think I fully ҒUCҜed with my face because of one picture of me as a teenager looking puffy. I’m pretty sure you don’t look the same now as you did at 13, right? I have never used filler. Let’s just put an end to that. I have no issue with it, but it’s not for me. Whoever thinks I’ve gotten my eyes lifted or whatever it’s called — it’s face tape! The oldest trick in the book. I’ve had this impostor syndrome where people made me feel like I didn’t deserve any of 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 the end of the day, the model know she’s had a blessed life and a fruitful career. But she has always had to fight to stay mentally healthy, especially in one of the most grueling fields. “Now everything that I do in my personal life is literally to make sure that my mental state stays above water,” she revealed. “Fashion can make you or break you. And if it makes you, you have to make a conscious effort every day for it not to break you. There’s alway a bit of grief in love.”