Jenner and her sister Kylie grew up in a vast blended family that included eight older half-siblings. The shyest of the brood, she was perhaps the least temperamentally equipped for life on the reality show that her mother, Kris, pitched to Ryan Seacrest in 2007. She liked to be alone, she liked to ride horses, and she struggled to make inroads with her peers. Watching Kylie, two years younger, move so easily among her friends was sometimes painful. Jenner believes she has suffered from anxiety since she was seven years old, though back then she didn’t have a name for the feeling. She often approached her mother complaining of difficulty breathing, and Kris found it hard to reassure her. Doctor visits ensued, and she would invariably check out fine. “I was an emotional kid, always in my feelings and my head,” she remembers. “I freaked myself out a bit.” She learned much later that those boom-out-of-nowhere bursts of dread, accompanied by a mix of physical symptoms, were panic attacks.
Fashion cured her of her shyness, as she hoped it would. “I remember being that awkward kid at the beginning of my modeling career and thinking to myself, I’m going to come out of this,” she says. “It’s such a social job—working with photographers and stylists and creative directors all day long—and that’s how things started to click for me. I tend to get really emotional now talking about my friendships. I still find myself standing at the edge of a conversation at a big social event, but now I have the most incredible friend group, and as a kid I just didn’t have that. I’m huge on the people in my life. I love getting to know people, I love holding on to people from my past. I’m completely the opposite of the super-shy kid that I was.”
But a year or two into her modeling career, the panic attacks returned. Air travel, that bane of those who hate to cede control, seemed to invite them. “I remember having these meltdowns on planes,” she says. “They would come out of nowhere. I’d be like, Oh my God, oh my God, something’s wrong with my heart: palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness, double vision, tingles. The whole thing. I’d call my mom hysterically crying and say, ‘I need them to stop the plane, I need them to turn around.’ ” In the years since then, Jenner has built a formidable arsenal in defense of her well-being: deep breathing, distraction, meditation, journaling, weekly psychotherapy, periodic consultations with a spiritual healer. It’s now been two years since her last panic attack.
“Kendall is somebody who really cares about growing and knowing herself better and going deeper with herself,” her best friend, Hailey Bieber, explains. “I really respect that about her. We’re not stingy with each other when it comes to sharing the stuff we’ve done or learned or tried, whether that’s cold plunges or saunas, a really cool naturopath, a new skin-care product or supplement, a trainer, or somebody who does sound baths. It’s nice when your friend is as into taking care of herself as you are, and we share a little black book of wellness contacts.”
