Bow ties and blue dreadlocks, padded bras and bullying: who'd be a teenager? Ten grown-ups, all doing just fine now, remember the agonies of adolescence

I was a teenage geek. I don't mean the 19th-century definition when a geek was "a carnival performer whose act involved biting the heads off helpless creatures". (A sort of Victorian version of Simon Cowell, but with more humanity.) I mean the modern meaning: "An unfashionable or socially inept person."

I wore glasses. I was socially awkward. I collected comic books (even drew my own) and obsessed over certain films and TV shows. For a while, I was so hooked on Jeeves And Wooster, I took to wearing a bow tie to school. Picture that. I'm at a working-class comprehensive in a suburb of Bristol and I'm dressed like a PG Wodehouse character. When the teacher called out the register, everyone else answered "Here" or "Present". For three months I used, "What ho!"

I couldn't understand why I didn't have a girlfriend.

There was no such thing as "geek chic" in my day. There were no fashion spreads featuring models in tweed jackets and glasses. Now hipsters buy specs with clear glass in them as fashion accessories, made by Tom Ford or Yves Saint Laurent. It's offensive to those of us with real eye defects. Spectacles are medical aids! What next? Angelina Jolie wearing a Jimmy Choo built-up shoe? Justin Timberlake put on some glasses and was allowed to play a geek in The Social Network. He said later in an interview, "I sort of don't believe in geek and cool. I'm sure at one time everybody has felt like a geek." Now I like Justin Timberlake, but he does not know what it's like to feel like a geek just because he once wore some glasses in a film. That's like me "blacking up" and saying I understand the African-American struggle. It's offensive on so many levels.

I should make it clear that no one chooses to be a geek. You don't suddenly decide to grow lank, greasy hair and wear bad, ill-fitting clothes. You don't wake up one day and think: "I don't want to look cool and sexy any more. I want to look like I live with my nan and have a dead body in the cellar."

When I first went to junior school, everyone was equal. We all just did our thing, playing in the playground, running and jumping and skipping. Everyone was friends with everyone else.

Then, around the age of 11 or 12, things started happening that I was not privy to. Certain girls started fancying certain boys, those boys started fancying those girls, they began talking about stuff, whispering things, passing notes, holding hands…

And geeks like me – we had no idea this was going on. We were still in the playground running and jumping and skipping. Meanwhile, behind our backs, those girls were showing those boys their underwear – and more.

When I got to secondary school, a division occurred, almost overnight, like the Berlin wall going up. Suddenly all the handsome, cool boys were in West Germany with all the pretty girls and the break-dance parties and the chest hair. And I was in cold, grey East Germany with the computer spods and the complete works of Arthur C Clarke, shouting across the wall to the cool boys…

Me: Hey, Mikey G, how come you're over there with all the hot chicks? And I'm stuck with the big girl with the moustache and the Chinese kid who's a born-again Christian?

Voice: Kum ba yah, my Lord...

Me: Not now, Chang!

Mikey G: What did you say, Steve? I can barely hear you over the sound of this boombox and girls' laughter.

Me: How do I get over to your side?

Mikey G: You can't.

Me: Why not?

Mikey G: Various reasons. Maybe if you didn't carry a briefcase to school…

Me: It matches my bow tie.

Mikey G: Maybe if you didn't volunteer for the St John Ambulance…

Me: I like the St John Ambulance. They helped me find my mum when I got lost at a vintage steam engine rally.

Mikey G: Yeah, that's another thing…

It was impossible for me to tunnel through. So I just gave in to geekism. I found I liked reading things instead of sniffing glue. I preferred writing my name on an exercise book than on a bus shelter. I decided I'd rather go to university than prison.

But as my ability to recall pointlessly obscure film, TV and music trivia increased, so my ability to talk to the opposite sex diminished until I wondered if I'd ever talk to a girl again. Chatting someone up seemed an impossible dream, like owning the first Batman comic.

Those cool boys on the other side of the wall had a magnetic hold over women and could charm them effortlessly. (One schoolmate is married now but still has the gift of the gab. When his wife said she felt there was something missing from their sex life, he managed to convince her it was other women.) I desperately needed a masculine role model. Then I found someone.

His name was James Bond.

I watched his movies religiously. He was so suave and witty that every woman he met fell in love with him. He was so cool that he even made jokes while having sex. When I was 15, I thought this was what women liked. It turns out they don't.

A few years later, I was given another bum steer, this time by lovelorn indie music. Listening to bands like the Cure and the Smiths led me to think I could win a girl's heart by making her realise I was poetic and thoughtful and consumed by higher things. This is why, during a party, while everyone was dancing and drinking in the kitchen, I tried to impress a girl by sitting quietly in another room reading Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. My plan was that the girl would realise I was some kind of 16-year-old West Country schoolboy philosopher-genius who did not concern himself with lowly teenage nonsense like snogging and getting trashed on Diamond White, immediately snog me, and then we'd get trashed on Diamond White.

After about 45 minutes of reading the same page, the girl in question finally stuck her head round the door. This is my moment, I thought.

Her: Hi.

Me: What ho.

Her: What you doing?

Me: Oh, y'know… just reading Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Her: What's that?

Me: Robert M Pirsig's philosophical novel about the metaphysics of quality.

Her: Right. Have you seen Mark Henderson?

Me: No.

And she left.

I waited 15 minutes, thinking she was probably somewhere in the party, being chatted up by a lunk-headed Neanderthal while her mind swam with thoughts of the intellectual powerhouse she'd just seen reading Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. She'll be back soon, I thought.

After half an hour I went out into the party.

The boy she had been looking for, Mark Henderson, was dancing on a table with his trousers round his ankles, singing The Chicken Song by Spitting Image.

The girl I fancied was in hysterics, clapping along with everyone else.

She and Mark went out for two years.

I got to page 20 of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, then gave up. What the hell is the metaphysics of bollocking quality anyway?

University seemed like a fresh start, an opportunity to restyle myself. When I was an undergraduate, there was a brief revival in Saturday Night Fever-style wide-collared 1970s shirts. I bought a shiny red one and wore it proudly to a party. It turned some heads. A lot of people complimented me. It was a new dawn for Steve.

I got chatting with an attractive sociology student. We hit it off. I was witty, sparkling, making her laugh with some well-chosen anecdotes. I thought, here we go, game on. We had this little exchange:

Her: You're on fire, Steve.

Me: Thanks very much.

Her: No, seriously – you are actually on fire…

My nylon sleeve had gone up on a candle.

I no longer consider myself a geek. The reason? Everyone is a geek nowadays. Everyone is on their computer or smartphone 24/7, Twittering or Facebooking. What is mainstream popular entertainment nowadays? Doctor Who, Spiderman, Iron Man. And I'm not interested in any of it. Iron Man? It's the 21st century and we're supposed to be excited about iron? "Oh wow, look at that guy – he's got some iron, the most common metal on the planet. Behold: a man who has harnessed the power of iron… like people did two and half thousand years ago during the iron age!"

The whole world has gone geek, and even though I'm not interested in any of it, I can still pass myself off. I can talk like one of them, act like one of them, but I'm not really one of them. It's like everybody's a pod-person and I'm just pretending, like at the end of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. I mean the 1978 remake starring Donald Sutherland and directed by Philip Kaufman, not the 1956 original by Don Siegel, who was forced to include a less downbeat ending at the behest of the studio.

Oh, no, wait…

• Stephen Merchant's standup tour, Hello Ladies, starts on 6 September; go to livenation.co.uk for ticket details. His new comedy show, Life's Too Short, will be on BBC2 this autumn.

'That time from 18-21 became known as the Wilderness Years in my family.'

It was all going so well: I was 16, holding my own at a brilliant school, popular with my classmates, captain of the netball, tennis and lacrosse teams, chair of the debating society. If anyone asked what I wanted to be, I'd say firmly, "A barrister."

Then one November evening I was at a friend's house: she and I, plus her 14-year-old sister and her mate, were doing exactly what we should have been doing at this age – making our way through the drinks cabinet. I found myself in the kitchen with my friend's sister's buddy and the unthinkable happened – she kissed me. She was 14, beautiful and nothing in my life had ever felt like that before. Yes, I'd had boyfriends, but it had always felt like I was going through the motions.

We fell in all-consuming love. Over the following months, we outed ourselves at school, the curiosity of our friends matched only by the horror of the teachers, not to mention the mothers. The only cloud that winter was that my mum was ill, awaiting a liver transplant, but my mum was optimistic (and in retrospect, in denial too) and I was being governed by a thumping heart and raging hormones.

In mid-February, the hospital received a liver match, but it didn't go well. The last time I saw my mum, she was unconscious in a bed soaked with blood and masses of tubes going in and out of her. She died a couple of hours later.

I went off the rails: I betrayed the love of my life with her best friend, then went on a rampage round the school looking for love. My dad, being a psychiatrist, knew better than to try to rein me in, hoping it would blow over, but the storm just kept building. A year later I was expelled.

I got a job selling perfume door to door, which I did for a year with a weird kind of success – I'm sure the inner pain made my eyes blaze, so I was hard to ignore, even for strangers. When that finished, I found myself up in Manchester and decided to stay there, out of my dad's gaze. That time from 18-21 became known as the Wilderness Years in my family. I rang my dad the week before my 21st birthday and tentatively asked if we should have lunch. We talked about my future, and he suggested that I think about becoming a chef: "God knows you're good with people, and you've always liked cooking."

I went at it hammer and tongs, driven by that most powerful of motivators: something to prove. I had finally found a channel for my energy. I got my first head chef job at 24. One of my proudest moments was being asked back to the school that had expelled me to talk about making it in the catering industry.

With hindsight, I can see that this incredibly challenging period shaped me for the unconventional, fulfilled life I have now.

• Allegra McEvedy's new book, Bought, Borrowed & Stolen: Recipes And Knives From A Travelling Chef , is published by Conran Octopus in October at £25.

'For some reason, I believed I would be irresistible if only I had blue dreadlocks.'



A humiliating photograph accompanies this article, but you can't see it. Even to describe that lost snapshot, I wince: a single blue dreadlock on a dance floor.

But first, allow me to delay my public embarrassment with a few words about my hair. Problem is, mine doesn't grow as hair ought, namely in a downward, gravity-obeying fashion. It expands, like the universe. One friend described my hair as resembling a microphone; another used the term "jewfro".

Ever since I first took notice, it has vexed me. Growing up in Vancouver in the 1980s, I coveted a fringe as both stylish and handy for concealing forehead spots. Yet even then, my hair mounted resistance, refusing the slightest flop.

By age 12, I had quit New Wave for punk, listening to the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, and sporting a lurid Dead Kennedys T-shirt, until my mother claimed it had "disappeared" one day in the laundry.

Undeterred, I grew my hair, planning magnificent spikes. No amount of gel made my hair submit. Instead of sharp, it became sticky and ultimately so crisp as to shatter if tapped by a toffee hammer.

So I exchanged punk for a fresh teen avatar, wearing button-down dress shirts in an attempt at preppy chic. I was unconvincing, but my parents were relieved.

In the early 1990s, I left home for the University of Toronto, aged 17 and was able to dress as inadvisably as I wished. I recall a pair of blue Doc Martens with steel toes, and a black shirt with a silver arabesque motif which, I regret to say, I buttoned to the top.

All this was part of a plan to seduce a fellow student, a young woman with a nose ring and effortless cool. For some reason, I believed I would be irresistible to her if only I had blue dreadlocks.

Nothing could be easier, said the hairdresser friend of a friend. First, I had to grow my hair for six weeks. He'd handle the rest.

As days passed, I watched my hair expand into ever stranger configurations. Finally, time was up. The dye went in first, added to my already dark hair. As I should have recalled from art class, black and blue combined do not make blue.

So, the hairdresser failed at stage one. I remember him rambling on about beeswax and matting, noting in passing that my hair wasn't long enough yet, so he'd add extensions.

Wait, wait. Hair extensions?

"They look totally natural," he assured me.

I sat weakly before the mirror, suspecting that I looked a fool – a concern vehemently denied by the hairdresser.

But no time to think: he was done and I was off to the club to peacock before the object of my affection. At least the lights would be low.

I danced, which should have been enough to repel her. But strobe lights work miracles. Midway through a Stone Roses remix, she turned her head as if a fast-moving object had shot past.

"Uhm, Tom," she said, "are, like, your dreadlocks flying out?"

"What?" I cried back. "Can't hear over the music!"

She knelt among the gyrating hips and swinging hands, rising with a single blue dreadlock and a smirk.

Somehow I escaped the club and hunted down the hairdresser.

"Looks fine!" he insisted of the last few dreads still clinging on.

"I look an idiot."

"Idiot is such a subjective word."

"Can I get them off?"

"Not without shaving your head."

Nearly 20 years later, I still shave my head.

Luckily for me, those were the days of perishable film and losable prints, not yet the time of everlasting digital. Teens of today beware: your haircuts, I fear, are going nowhere.

Miriam (behind) with her friend Carol. 'One evening, Carol and I made a plan. The next afternoon we were on a Greyhound bus, a folded $20 bill each in the pockets of our tight jeans… We were going to the roller-skating rink'

My friend Carol [front] and I were 14 and starting to understand the reason for boys. We lived in a small religious community of Russian Mennonite immigrants in Steinbach, Canada. Our parents worked hard and went to bed early, while we walked the main street in furry bomber jackets and blue eye shadow stolen from our older sisters. We were dying for something we couldn't articulate, dreaming of being kidnapped by city boys who'd appear out of nowhere with names like Etienne La Liberté and Brendan Sandhurst. We climbed on to the roof of the funeral home and sat cross-legged sharing cigarettes. We weren't sure of anything except that the boys who passed us in their fathers' cars, the cars we'd see lined up neatly outside church on Sunday, were looking at us, making certain sounds and gestures. These were boys we'd known all our lives. We had shared nap mats with them in kindergarten and seen them cry for their mothers. They had seen us, too.

One late Friday evening, up on the roof as usual, Carol and I made a plan. The next afternoon we were on a Greyhound bus, a folded $20 bill each in the pockets of our tight jeans. Two boys we knew from church got on the bus, too, and the smiling one said, "Hey, hi" and asked what we were going to do in the city. I said stuff, then Carol said, without even looking at them, "I think you guys are blocking the aisle." And I said, "Yeah, you should move to the back."

We were going to the roller-skating rink. Our fantasy was of a world-weary boy, a boy who'd experienced things, a boy who would walk up to us, not smiling but eyes burning with desire, and say, "Wanna skate?"

"No, no," Carol said, "he says nothing at all."

"Yeah," I said, "he just glances at the rink and holds out his hand."

Two boys did ask us to dance that evening. Jason and Philip were 16 and wore combat jackets and studied "humanities" at high school in Fort Rouge, a city suburb that was built, according to Jason, by fascists to destroy the souls of teenagers. To Carol and me, even the word suburb was exciting: it meant a city was attached to it. They told us we were cute. We told them we were 15 and had recently broken up with our boyfriends. They asked where we lived. "Well," I said, "not here." Jason laughed and agreed not many people made their homes in a roller rink. "No," I said, "I mean the city."

"Well, what city are you from?"

Carol and I looked at each other briefly. The city of… I said. Lights, said Carol. Philip asked what that was and I said Paris, as in France.

"Seriously?" Jason said. "Doubt it."

"No," I said, "we are. But we're staying with our… It's a farm exchange programme."

"In a small village," said Carol, "it's really boring. Two girls from there are staying at our place in Paris."

We held hands with the city boys, let them take us out behind the rink and kiss and touch us through our clothes. Jason whispered, "Je t'aime" as he unzipped my jacket and slipped his hand inside. We remembered we had a bus to catch and said we had to go. We stood around and smoked a cigarette. Jason and Philip said it was cool to make out with girls from Paris. We shrugged and made ourselves look complex. We made plans to meet the next weekend and they insisted on walking us to the bus depot.

We stood under the fluorescent light, the four of us, and watched our bus roll in. The destination sign said Steinbach, and we told Jason and Philip this was it, we were leaving. Then Jason said, "Hey, wait, Steinbach? Isn't that the Mennonite town? With all those religious weirdos?"

We said, "Yeah, it is. They're all losers. The girls staying in our apartment in Paris are so happy to be away from there." We were so close to escaping, seconds away, safe in our ridiculous lie. Then the smiling boy from church tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Hello, Miriam, how was your evening?" But he said it in the old Mennonite language of our parents, and Carol and I stared at him, then back at the city boys. Philip asked what this kid had said and we said, "How the hell should we know? We don't even know who he is."

Jason said, "But he just called you by your name." The smiling boy asked if our parents had allowed us to come to the city. Jason laughed and said, "How would they know, they were in Paris, so get lost." The boy looked at me and Carol for a second, then disappeared into the bus.

Carol and I spent the next four years in the same classroom as the boy from church. We became friends, in a way, but not really.

We felt ashamed in the bright light of his grace and tried to keep our distance. He never mentioned that evening at the bus depot to us or to anyone else. I often thought about writing a letter thanking him. The city boys didn't show up at the rink the next weekend and Carol and I stopped making plans, although we kept climbing on to the roof of the funeral home to watch the local boys drive around and around.

Tom Rob Smith (back row, next to the teacher). 'The truth is, I just didn't get it: I couldn't ­complete the sexual equation that was staring me in the face.'

What was the particular profile of my adolescent awkwardness? A part of it was unquestionably that I didn't grasp my sexuality. I occasionally have it put to me, that I disguised or lied about my sexuality until my early 20s. I don't recognise this description. The truth is, I just didn't get it: I couldn't complete the sexual equation that was staring me in the face – and my awkwardness came from the fact that other people could. They could say, in spite, or as a matter of fact, or silently in their head, that I was gay.

Of all the emotions I've experienced, having others know you better than you know yourself is not one I'd like to repeat. The sensation is disempowering. To interact, you have to know who you are. Not being able to articulate your identity is to start every meeting from an unstable foundation: you're awkward because you're waiting for the cracks to show.

Homophobia, like a wretched companion, followed me through my school years. There was a clutter of incidents – walking to and from school, perpetually overtaken by three students who would call out "Faggot", and feeling thankful for the days when they said nothing. I remember standing in the lunch queue and a student walking up and down, loudly trying to persuade others to ask if I was gay; or listening as a teacher referred to gay children as "nancy boys", with a sideways glance at me, a professional member of staff complicit with the very people seeking to make my life miserable. Adults, I realised, offered no sanctuary from this nastiness.

But these were just surface scratches. Far worse in terms of my personality were my feelings of relief when another student was targeted and I was overlooked. I've never bullied anyone, but rejoicing when it's someone else is almost as bad.

Yet it was not the homophobia of those who disliked me that was hardest to deal with. It was the homophobia of friends and family that rendered me most uncomfortable in my skin. What could make a person more awkward than constantly to wonder how fickle is love, how fickle is friendship, that with two words – I'm gay – those bonds would dissolve, the invites to meet up would cease, the parents of your best friends would no longer want you in their house, conversations that had been light and fun would turn sour and dark, and relationships formed over many years would be washed away like marks on a sandy beach. As you grow older, you comfort yourself with the notion that any relationship destroyed by merely declaring your sexuality was not worthy of a single tear, but unfortunately that is not true – many wonderful relationships are lost this way, obliterated in the blink of an eye.

I find it hard to wish away those years of awkwardness, though. It locked me away and taught me how, in the absence of real contact, I could connect with people through fiction, through reading and writing. After all, if it's possible to feel comfortable in the company of a person conjured through words, someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a fictional character who never existed, then I was always certain – one day – it would be possible to feel at ease in the company of others.

• Agent 6, by Tom Rob Smith, is published by Simon & Schuster

'Once I got to university, I felt I was finally coming into my own, which is surprising, in retrospect, because that was when I was at my most gauche.'

My awkward years began early for me, not just in greasy adolescence. Aged nine, I'd flit around the garden, as pallid as I could manage, in my Victoriana nightdress – thank God for Past Times – chatting urgently to the ether about, you know, being nine and where my real parents were. (They were indoors.) I would mount my rusty climbing frame with meaning, away from my brothers and their prosaic interests of Lego and Spurs, and I'd become Cordelia, my other, less suburban self. Or Anne of Green Gables. I wanted to be anyone but Katherine of Tolworth.

My identity anxiety continued into my teens. While others knew their hobbies, tastes and political views, mine changed depending on who was asking. I'd move from group to group, from sporty girls to bad girls to square girls – I was sporty, bad and square enough to fit in fleetingly, my voice changing accordingly. Useful now, as an actress. Then… just odd.

Once I got to university, I felt I was finally coming into my own, which is surprising, in retrospect, because that was when I was at my most gauche. I dressed more or less in full period costume – corset, puff sleeves, knickerbockers – and even held a pipe on occasion, all under the guise of being "ironic". I shudder to remember how I strode around town, welcoming the stares of passersby, confident they were of the admiring kind. I cringe to think of tutorials where esteemed experts had to suffer me as I smoked endless Gauloises in order to facilitate our discussion of Descartes. Perhaps what might have facilitated it better would have been to have read him.

What a relief it is to get older and to realise the only thing that isn't cool is pretending to be something you're not. Apart from when it's your job.

'My school uniform was bottle green and my parents felt my turban should match… you can see the periphery was a place I was destined to inhabit.’

Growing up in Glasgow as the only kid in a turban was challenging enough. Add the fact that my school uniform was bottle green and my parents felt my turban should match, and you can see the periphery was a place I was destined to inhabit. Had I been an Adonis, the other things might have been surmountable. Alas, I was a rotund, bespectacled kid with a larger than normal backside; a kid, moreover, who refused to live on Duran Duran's "Planet Earth".

On reflection, a single error in my early teens became the tent-peg for all my subsequent woes: I chose Spandau Ballet. Almost everyone at school backed Duran Duran, but I eschewed the pretty boys of pop for a band named after a concentration camp and a type of classical dance.

I shared my opinion with anyone who'd listen. I mean, what sort of name is Rio for a lassie? (It isn't a suitable name for a footballer either.) My preference for Spandau meant I was shunned, and defaulted into a particular group. There was John, the hated English kid; Neil, the goth; Jamie, the son of the head of English; Michael, the tall freak with sausage fingers; and me, Spandau Ballet/fat/brown/turban boy.

Truth is, I did like Spandau Ballet, but no more or no less than Duran Duran. I suspect I was "getting my retaliation in first". I was a grade-A gobshite, so it was only a matter of time before I would alienate those around me. I took the initiative and saved them the effort. And while it did feel lonely, I owe a great debt to those years of being on the outside, and to Tony Hadley, who best sums up my troublesome teenage times:

"Always believe in your soul,

You've got the power to know

You're indestructible…"

Gold.

'I was wretched at school, lost a stone a term from sheer misery.'

I was at boarding school at the start of my teens, in wartime, when life for girls that age (they hadn't invented teenagers) was about as different as it is possible to imagine from today's girls. I had wanted to board after reading too many girls' school stories, and started at Downe House. I was homesick, but getting used to it, when, after just a month or two, they sent home all the girls whose parents were in the north – lest they get separated by a German invasion. My parents, unusual for their time, cared more about proper education for a girl than anything, and sent me to Roedean, also evacuated to Cumberland. It was as keen on sport, at which I was hopeless, as any boys' school – we even sang the Harrow school song featuring "the tramp of the 42 men", though any girl who had become the tramp of 42 men would have been expelled. I was wretched there, lost a stone a term from sheer misery, but it wasn't because of the school's ethos so much as the fact I was teased rotten and never made any real friends. After two years, I ran away – bicycled 30 miles home – and didn't go back.

I went to board with a family in Glasgow and went to a day school; the Scottish girls were friendly and welcoming, and life became good. Mainly I was with a family with two ravishingly attractive teenage boys whom I chastely adored; never a touch was exchanged between us, but I mooned and dreamed. I made it to Cambridge at 19, by which time I'd been kissed only twice – both times reluctantly. I had a fantastic time. We girls were straight from school, but the men were not – they'd all done national service, most had been in the war; they knew a thing or two that they were anxious to teach us. There is something to be said, I suppose, for losing your virginity in the college where your father, uncle, brother and best friend had passed their formative years; but it wasn't the walls of hallowed Trinity, but of Trinity Hall over which I was lowered wearing a gentleman's hat and raincoat – by a man who later became a high court judge. And it's worth reminding people who think women got liberated only in the 60s that there was a lot to be said for leaving college, as we all did in 1950, expecting both to get married and to have serious jobs – which we did. By 25 I was running a club in Finland and preparing for a postgraduate year in America – the contrast with the awful boarding school making it all seem even better.

At one school disco, the girls took it in turns to come up, ask me where I’d got my dress, then dissolve into giggles… It was not a nice school.'

I can safely lay claim to having one of the world's longest awkward stages. I now understand my parents encouraging me to be clever and hard-working and focus on university instead of being distracted by looks or girlieness. But blimey, for a gangly, big-nosed girl, it didn't make life much fun.

At one school disco, the girls took it in turns to come up, ask me where I'd got my dress, then dissolve into giggles. The boys just shouted "horsehead" when I passed. It was not a nice school.

Every fibre of my being had to get out of there. The farthest I could stretch my leash was Edinburgh university, two hours away. Having lied about my age on my Ucca form, one week after my 17th birthday, with an accent as thick as battered sausage and the life experience of someone who'd been to France twice on a ferry, I crossed to the other side of the country.

Then, much of Edinburgh's arts intake was made up of the Oxbridge rejects of the English upper middle classes. I'd never met anyone English. They had gap years, allowances, highlights, were all going on 20, told jokes to which the punchline was "Tower Hamlets!!" and were as alien a species as I'd ever met, and vice versa. In south-west Scotland, "Which school did you go to?" means, "Are you a Protestant or a Catholic and are we about to have a fight?" Suddenly, it simply meant, "Do you matter?"

Having spent the summer interning at a local paper (I say interning; they gave me a week's work experience and I point- blank refused to leave I loved it so much) on the local newspaper, I figured the student paper was a good place to start. I decided to join the student newspaper. A terrifyingly beautiful and self-confident girl in a cloche, smoking, looked at me disdainfully(probably wondering why they'd let a child in) and when I said I wanted to write for them, blew out smoke and, in the voice of , said, "Well. I don't know."

Of course, I took this as a huge rejection. In retrospect, she may have just been in the wrong meeting. This is the curse of the awkward stage: you never know how much is in your own head.

Everything was problematic, until I stood on a stage telling a story that made people who didn't know me laugh. My foray into standup was short-lived, but telling a joke rather than being a joke changed everything. I finally figured out what I wanted to do with my life. It didn't make my nose any smaller, but I do put my cheery disposition down to the fact that when I wake up, I don't have to go to school. Not now, not ever again. Joy.

'I felt betrayed by my 183cm frame – a larger-than-life fortress that commanded autho­rity and kept my tiny personality prisoner within.'

"It's a blessing she's such a nice little thing because she'll never be pretty," said the nursery teacher. I was bowlegged: while my feet met politely, my knees grew in opposite directions. As for my teeth, I knew enough to keep them hidden. I became used to being not quite right.

In my teenage years, I felt betrayed by my 183cm frame – a larger-than-life fortress that commanded authority and kept my tiny personality prisoner within. By 15, I had outgrown not only my fellow pupils but also most of my teachers and my own father.

I remember longing to have breasts and wearing two padded bras in an attempt to look normal; longing to swim but refusing to show my naked body to anyone in the changing room. During one memorable lesson, I desperately needed to use the bathroom but instead sat through the entire class, slowly going numb. The embarrassment of unravelling my lengthy frame was, in my opinion, far more painful. I bought my ballet shoes and Doc Martens a size too small, to try to stop my feet from growing.

No one stood up to bullies, not even me, "Morticia", the girl whose first runway was the school corridor where eyes stuck to me like superglue for all the wrong reasons. In the school production of Alice In Wonderland, I was cast as the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland (of a hundred potential caterpillars, why was I the one they chose to alienate?). If I think about the shedding of the caterpillar's skin, though, I see it's central to my own story.

On a relatively ordinary day, my life took an extraordinary new direction that was to propel me into the fashion industry. Not even my heavy metal braces and determined profile were considered a hindrance.

To become a model was to feel physically accepted for the first time in my life. Paradoxically, what made me was not an imagined beauty, but my imperfections.To succeed it helped to be a willing chameleon. I'm still quietly petrified at being looked at and so, it makes sense that I deal with that as a daily challenge – I guess you might call it a life long commitment, I call it an addiction!