documento

HEALING MIND, BODY AND SOUL ON A BREAK IN SPAIN
CHESKA HULL
THE ‘MADE IN CHELSEA’ STAR OPENS UP
EXCLUSIVELY ABOUT HER FATHER’S TRAGIC
SUICIDE AND ‘THE ONE’ THAT GOT AWAY
(INSET ABOVE) VEST, LEGGINGS, JACKET: LIJA. WATER BOTTLE: MOBOT
thousand miles away from SW3,
A the exclusive London postcode
with which her name has become
synonymous, Made in Chelsea star
Cheska Hull is brimming with energy
when hello! meets her.
The 29-year-old PR whizz and
original cast member of the Bafta
award-winning scripted reality TV
show is full of enthusiasm about the
two-hour trek she’s just completed in
Spain’s stunning Bernia mountains,
part of her daily routine during her
stay at the restorative Inside Out
retreat near Alicante.
“The air is so clean up there and
the light so amazing, it’s the most
freeing feeling. When you pause and
take in the beauty of what’s around
you, you can feel your head clearing,”
she says, as she gazes out at the view
from her balcony.
“If anyone had said to me this time
last year that I’d be going hiking, I’d
have said, ‘No thanks, not my thing,’”
she adds with a smile. “But it has been
a revelation and such a beneficial
part of the healing process.”
For it’s not just physically that
Cheska has climbed a mountain. For
the first time, she is opening up to
hello! about the private battle she
has been fighting with crippling
depression, an illness that earlier this
year saw her sink to such depths of
despair that she spent some days
confined to her bed.
Speaking out about it has been a
difficult decision for Cheska, who has
largely managed to keep the most
personal areas of her life away from
the media glare. Not least because
doing so forces her to address private
and upsetting issues that she has only
recently started to deal with.
BROKEN RELATIONSHIP
But having just taken on the role of
an ambassador for the mental health
charity Mind, Cheska hopes that by
sharing her own experience she can
encourage other sufferers to seek the
support that, to the detriment of her
physical and emotional wellbeing,
she rebuffed for so long.
“I can see now that my depression
was building up for some time, but I
buried it and buried it and tried so
hard to put on a front because the
alternative was to deal with intensely
painful things that I had such
confused feelings about,” she says.
“But this summer, it got to the
point where I felt so helpless and lost
and overwhelmed, I knew I had to ask
for help because I was scared about
where it was going.”
The catalyst for Cheska seeking
support was the breakdown in August
of her relationship with a banker
called Mike, whom she had quietly
been dating for two and a half years
and whom she had truly believed to
be The One.
The end was sudden and brutal,
given the length of time they’d been