大象传媒

by Rosie Stopher

Camilla Thurlow is best known for her ups and downs in the Love Island villa.

But on the Duvet Days podcast, she opens up about how prior to taking part in the reality show, she was struggling with her mental health – and it was her two months in the Mallorcan villa that helped her move on.

Before entering Love Island, Camilla worked as a bomb disposal expert in countries like Cambodia and Afghanistan.

She removed landmines from areas that had previously been involved in conflict, and often met families who had lost loved ones to explosions, or who were living with the trauma left behind.

She tells Duvet Days host Abby Hollick how she found it tough to balance her job with her personal life.

“I’m one of those people who can feel people’s feelings. If I see someone else crying, quite often it will make me cry as well.

“I struggle to separate my emotions from the emotions of other people or from the situations that go on around me, and that just doesn’t work there, it wasn’t working for me.”

She explains that she found it hard to enjoy her own life, knowing that the people she met in her work had faced terrible tragedy.

“I did quite a lot of feeling bad for being happy, feeling bad for being lucky, feeling bad for being privileged, feeling bad for being able to step away from these places when I wanted to.”

As a result, she says, she found it hard to maintain relationships with her family and friends.

“It was like I was in a house with a broken doorbell, so people were trying to get in, people were ringing, my family were trying to get in, but I just couldn’t hear anything. I was just shut off.”

Camilla says she was desperately looking for a way to reconnect with her friends and socialize again.

“I knew I wasn’t right, I knew I wasn’t myself, but I didn’t know what I could do to change things, and it was at that time that a casting researcher from Love Island approached me and I went in for a chat with her and one of the other members of the team”

“It was the scariest thing and it was so out of my comfort zone,” she says, but admits it seemed like the quickest fix to her problem.

“It gives you a sense of the introspection that I was feeling at that stage, that I didn’t think about it as a reality TV show. I literally thought about it as ‘maybe this will help me sort myself out’

“I thought maybe I could give my brain the break it needed to just get back to normal, recalibrate a bit. And it did!”

“It was a real gamble, but for me it paid off in the way that I did come out of it a more balanced person. And I have to say, every day since, have felt very lucky to have been part of the experience because I don’t think I would feel as happy as I do now without it.”

Camilla went on to be a runner-up in the competition, with her now boyfriend, Jamie Jewitt.

She tells Abby that life with Jamie has a lot to do with her new found happiness and confidence.

“He’s basically my biggest critic at the same time as being my biggest supporter, and that just gives you the chance to embrace so many more opportunities. It completely changes your life.”

Listen to Camilla’s Duvet Days episode on 大象传媒 Sounds.