by Anna Gekoski
So I started having lots of plastic surgery. And, you know, because of the bruises and stuff from the surgery, and my insecurity about how I looked anyway, I would have been more than happy to just stay in and plan for my next surgery. More than happy. But I was in demand as a glamour model and I had to have the money for my next surgery, so I had to do the modelling, I had to do the TV and newspaper work. But I used to turn up for photo shoots all the time with black eyes and bruises and everything and in a way it was self-sabotaging my career. It was stressful but in my mind I thought: ‘It doesn’t matter, I look like shit, but I’ll have the next surgery and I’ll look a lot better.’ It was awful.
I didn’t understand, being young, what I was doing with my life. And to me, my childhood was normal, I didn’t understand that it had affected me, so obviously I was having plastic surgery and I didn’t understand why I was having plastic surgery. And I got quite badly depressed around this time, so I started taking antidepressants, off and on, from the age of about eighteen, nineteen, and I think the tablets worked really well because they level out your serotonin levels. But I was on a high dosage and I remember being in an absolute cloud, so drugged up, I couldn’t concentrate for more than twenty minutes. People used to think I was on drugs all the time but I was just on these tablets and, yeah, they numb you don’t they, so you’re neither here nor there. I couldn’t think deeply, I couldn’t . . . I didn’t have much feeling, I was just a breathing shell.
I think I started to realise that I might have a problem with my body image – and having all the surgeries – in my early twenties, but I just carried on. But by my mid-twenties I knew that I had a serious problem. By then I’d had hundreds of procedures. In all I’ve had something like seventy operations under general anaesthetic, including sixteen boob jobs, six nose jobs, eleven operations on the skin around my eyes, a facelift, tummy tuck, a rib shortened, my toes shortened, implants in my bottom, implants in my face, my brows shaved. And then there have been all the non-surgical procedures, like Botox, fillers, laser treatments. It’s all cost me over a million pounds. To pay for it I went without food or ate beans on toast, I didn’t buy nice clothes, I dyed my own hair. Because I always had to make sure I had enough for surgery; I had absolutely nothing so I could have more surgery.
Surgery was what gave me hope, what gave me my happiness, what gave me function. It was my way of life and it was very hard to have another way of life. I liked having the surgery, I liked recovering, I liked the anticipation, I liked the struggle of it, I liked all of it, everything associated with it. If I didn’t have surgery what did I have? It was the way I functioned: it was my oxygen. It was like someone who collects toys and stuff, I could bury myself away in my own world. I didn’t have to have functional relationships, I didn’t have to live my life like everyone else, and I had a reason: because I was always injured. It became my life and the more things that happened that were bad for me – if I was in a relationship and they were nasty to me or abused me – I just thought: ‘I don’t really care, I just want to have surgery next week.’
So, you know, surgery was my comfort. Just like an anorexic with food, surgery was my comfort, and it used to work. That’s the thing: it worked. I think it was a mixture of addiction, obsession. Like an alcoholic or drug addict, I self-medicated with plastic surgery because it was . . . you know, because I’m a thinker. At the end of the day alcohol wouldn’t have worked for me because it’s ultimately a depressant and it makes you look like shit so it was never logical to drink or to take drugs but this seemed like a logical decision. But it wasn’t a nice thing to be known for. Nobody wants to wake up in the morning and become the world’s most worked-on woman. And no one wants to be famous for having plastic surgery, that was never what I wanted to be. I aspired to being Barbie and Marilyn Monroe, I never aspired to be a freak.
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I was probably officially diagnosed as being body dysmorphic in my late twenties after I’d been referred to a psychiatrist. But I just thought they were lying. I thought mental illness didn’t exist and it was an exaggeration. I didn’t agree with it; I was still having surgery so I didn’t want to agree with it. And I was angry because there was no kind of solution. So I said: ‘I’m not mentally ill and I don’t want to be mentally ill, I don’t want to have something wrong with me.’ I felt that one day I was going to get it right, that I’d just gone down the wrong road and I’d been unlucky and met the wrong surgeons and everything else. I didn’t think that actually it was my problem, it was my fault, and that I was wasting my time and money. That’s a tough pill to swallow and it took a while.
To me, being body dysmorphic is like being imprisoned by your own mind because you’re locked into the most powerful thing in the world, which is your own self. And you know, there’s no answer, there’s no escape from it. Being body dysmorphic is like . . . I don’t know, I can’t think of anything worse. I’m sure people would argue and say there are lots of things worse, but I can’t think of anything, because it takes you over. It’s very hard to have a normal life in any shape or form: you can’t have a proper relationship, you can’t believe anyone who says you’re beautiful or good-looking, you can’t walk down the street or be in crowded places because you think everyone’s going to be looking, and pointing, and laughing at you. You’re just never happy with yourself.
And you’re trapped in this whole world where you’re locked into having plastic surgery after plastic surgery and nothing can get you out of it: there’s no tablet and no operation. You’re blind, completely blind to what you look like, and you’re obsessed with something and you totally believe it. I’ve been completely obsessed over the weirdest things, like a mole, and I’ve gone to ten, fifteen doctors, and they humour you, but you have to have that mole removed and you have to have it removed that week. There’s a real urgency. And it takes a hell of a lot of strength to be able to work it out and overcome it and find different ways of coping and different ways of living your life where you’re happy and using that obsession that you focused on – and the organisation skills that you developed to get all the work done – in a more productive way. It takes a lot; it takes a lot to work out why you’re in that place in the first place and it takes guts to change it.
For me it took rehab to get to that place. The first time I went to rehab was actually for a programme called Celebrity Rehab. My agent rang me up and said: ‘Do you want to go to rehab? Thirty days, for free, and you get treatment, and it’s in Malibu.’ And I said: ‘Nobody goes to rehab for body dysmorphia, that’s just embarrassing.’ And they said: ‘Listen, speak to the counsellor and see what you think afterwards.’ And because it was in Malibu they said: ‘Look, we have people coming here for shoe addiction, shopping addiction, all sorts of things’, and they said: ‘We’ve never had body dysmorphia but we’ve had other things similar to that and we will treat you like any other addict. We’ll treat you the same as a heroin addict or an alcoholic. Just the same.’ They said to me that body dysmorphia is treated the same because it’s the same kind of thinking: you’re addicted.
So I went. And it wasn’t like normal rehab, where you have to scrub the floor with a toothbrush, and they break you down to build you up again. It was kind of alternative, so they believe in things like acupuncture, and they combine counselling with massage and Buddhist philosophy, healthy eating, just changing your way of life. In a way by breaking you down, but mentally, by making you understand why you did what you did, getting to that point of opening up. And then they build you up to make you realise that you’re not the piece of shit that you were brought up to believe you are.
But it was hard and I ended up running away from rehab twice – no, three times – because I couldn’t handle it when they went into my past. To me, it was very uncomfortable thinking about my childhood because I’d changed my name, I’d changed my life, and that part of my life was dead. And Sarah Howes was dead. It was very hard and I refused to do that, I didn’t want to go back, but they s
aid I needed to go back to go forward. So I kept running away because I just didn’t believe in their philosophy, until eventually they said: ‘You’re never going to get better until you stop running away from things.’ So I came back and I finished the reality programme, which took all the strength I’ve ever had in my life, and then I went straight back afterwards and had loads of therapy, more so than I’ve ever had.
I did relapse though and I did go back to having surgeries. For some reason I had all these implants put in my face, which I felt really deformed me and were probably the worst surgery I had ever done. I was just so self-destructive and surgery was my alcohol or my heroin, so I went back to rehab for a second and third time. Because for me, it’s like giving up smoking: it’s not about failing, it’s the more times you try, the more chance you’ve got of giving up for good. And it was quite hard at times because it was all quite regimental and my natural instinct was to rebel against that so I’d do really stupid things. I’d sneak in some paracetamols or turn up late from shopping trips to get on the coach, so I ended up not being allowed to go out because I’d been punished. Also, obviously at rehab they said: ‘You can’t drink, you can’t smoke’, and I thought: ‘Well, I’m not here for alcohol problems or anything like that so why can’t I go out and get drunk?’ And that was the hardest thing because I realised that I hadn’t completely changed my life.
But I was on this learning curve and I knew I was going to succeed and every time I succeeded a little bit more. And after the third time in rehab I eventually did change my life. I changed my diet: I became a vegan and I eat very healthily now, and I took away stimulants like coffee and alcohol. I don’t go out drinking, I haven’t touched alcohol for a couple of years now. And I don’t excessively exercise but I exercise every day to make sure I keep myself happy. So yeah, I had to change my whole lifestyle to live my life in a different way and go down a different path from where I was. Because I knew if I started drinking, going clubbing, going back into that old life, with my old friends, then I would go back into having my plastic surgeries because that was my life. I had to walk away from my entire life and everything I knew.
I’ve become a businesswoman now. On my trips to LA, during my stays in rehab, I discovered this thing called argan oil and it completely changed my skin, my hair, my face, my body: it was re-moisturising, it was nourishing, it had nothing nasty in it, it was completely natural. So I visited the women’s cooperative in Morocco and they were such lovely women so I made a deal with them, then and there, to become the sole distributer of their argan oil in this country and started this company up. And so I helped the women over there and obviously they helped me because I now have a successful business. It’s definitely helped my recovery and I feel I’ve got a real purpose in life. I’m helping women and different charities and I feel the power of Mother Nature and how you can work with Mother Nature, not against it. When I changed my lifestyle I became sort of eco-friendly and conscious of my environment and everything is positive about my product. My brand is definitely a lifestyle thing: it’s about being happy with yourself and making the most of what you’ve got. And Mother Nature actually is a very powerful tool and if you work with it it’s amazing what you can achieve.
It has just left me so annoyed that I spent all my twenties locked in this whole surgery trip. I’m just so angry with my relationship to plastic surgery, it’s unbelievable. I feel like as a child I was let down by my father, as a young woman I was let down by my boyfriends, and then I turned to surgery and I was let down by plastic surgeons. I’ve said that I feel like plastic surgeons are like acid attackers in white coats and I know people have said: ‘How can you compare yourself to somebody who’s been attacked?’ Well, I can actually because I was attacked myself when I was fourteen years old – I was bottled in the face – so I know what it’s like to be attacked. And it’s worse when it’s the doctors who you feel are doing the attacking. I think it’s the trust issue because you have to put your trust in the doctors, because if you can’t trust a doctor then who can you trust? But there are surgeons who I think are literally just driven by money and who have made me worse off than when I started. I just wish that they had been more responsible towards me; they should have offered me counselling.
So I’d say to anyone who has suffered from the same issues as me – the eating disorders, the body dysmorphia – just get help. If you’re in that whole trapped world then demand counselling. You think you can do it yourself but you can’t. You know, I started trying to get help by reading self-help books but the problem is the pages are blank because you don’t have the skills and the tools to be able to work it out and understand it. You need someone to be able to direct your thoughts in the right direction. In America it’s normal – over there they’re not shy, they’re not embarrassed about asking for help – but we’re very stiff upper lip, you know, soldier on. What’s our saying: ‘Keep calm and carry on?’ Don’t. You don’t need to. Go and ask for help. Go and get some counselling.
I would say I’ve been cured now for about a year and a half, two years. It’s a fragile recovery though, I’m still on the journey of recovery, but I’m on the right path now I feel. I worked through why I had the surgery, why I had been depressed, and it was a tough pill to swallow, but actually I realised that I was good enough in myself and I was an intelligent person and it made me believe in myself. So I didn’t need the tablets anymore, I didn’t need the surgery anymore, because I believed in myself. And if I fall down and I do have surgery then, as any alcoholic or heroin addict will tell you, it’s not the end of the world. I’m still on that journey. But I’m actually more happy with myself now than I’ve ever been. I’m just concentrating on positives in my life; I live my life in a bubble of positivity.
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One month later we spoke to Alicia again after seeing reports in the newspaper that she had had more plastic surgery . . .
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At the end of the day, putting aside the body dysmorphia and my addiction, the fact is I think I’ve had some pretty horrendous surgery. The worst surgery for me was the awful implants that I had put in my face, which were actually really painful, and with the chin implants it felt like I could hardly move my face at all. Also, during another of my surgeries, a major nerve was cut on one side of my face so I couldn’t move my mouth properly and it looked like I’d had a stroke all the time. And it just got to the point where it was very soul-destroying and hard to carry on living like that. Even though I’d adapted my life not to rely on my looks – now that I’ve got a skincare company my looks don’t matter either way – I still couldn’t look in the mirror without getting very upset and having a sinking feeling. I hated, I really hated, looking in the mirror.
Then a friend who I’d met in a plastic surgery waiting office whose whole life, like mine, had been destroyed by having plastic surgery, recommended a new surgeon who’d done corrective work on her which she was really pleased with. So I saw the results and I thought: ‘Yep, I’ll take a chance and see him.’ So I went, even though I didn’t really have much intention of having anything done because I felt like I wasn’t going to have any more surgery. But after I talked to him and another surgeon who he brought in – who is an expert in maxilloacial surgery – and they told me what they could do, I started to think about it. They said: ‘There’s an operation which we haven’t done before which we could try to do to correct the nerve damage, which is to attempt to suspend the lip, to staple it up.’ It was basically a trial, a fifty–fifty chance to see if it would work. And they were very responsible, they gave me counselling and a psychiatric assessment, so they were really careful. They said: ‘We wouldn’t be suggesting this unless we really thought we could help you.’
But I had to consider it carefully because it was a big operation, an eight-hour operation, and, obviously, it was going forward with more surgery. And that’s why I had to make a really careful decision about this reconstructive surgery, because it’s like an alcoholic walk
ing into a pub and drinking water. And some would say: ‘You know what? Be happy with how you are’, but unfortunately I couldn’t be. So I thought: ‘I’ve got one more chance, I’m going to take another gamble.’ And of course there was that question in my mind, where I kind of thought: ‘Am I doing it for the right reasons?’ It’s a question that I don’t think anybody can answer really – what’s acceptable and what’s not – because it’s a fine line, that line of whether it’s plastic or recon. And because I’m addicted to plastic surgery that hope did come back and I couldn’t help thinking: ‘Yeah, this is going to be really great, the result’s going to be perfect.’ And I had to keep grounding myself and stopping that mindset, realising that it wasn’t about looking better, it was about damage control and getting back to where I was in the beginning. It wasn’t going to make me look better per se, it was going to take me back to when my face moved more naturally.
So I spent my last bit of savings, that were meant to be for my company, to take a gamble and have this last surgery. And basically I had all the implants taken out: my chin implants, nose implants, the implant underneath my nose, my cheek implants. Oh, also, because when they take the implants out it leaves your skin saggy, they had to basically give me a facelift, which meant that they had to break my jaw in two places, bring my jaw forward, and take my ears off. And then I had my lips lifted and the muscles in my face tightened. Overall it has made a huge difference, I’m so much happier without having the implants and my face is moving a lot better.