CalmMoment.com 63baking
L
ast year, Kim-Joy brightened up our
screens on The Great British Bake Off
with her quirky, colourful and
inventive creations. Initially, she
seemed timid and self-conscious,
but her baking skills shone through every week,
winning her a well-deserved place in the finals.
For Kim-Joy, making it that far was a real
achievement, as she’s struggled with social anxiety
for many years. As a teenager, Kim-Joy was so
quiet that she barely spoke at all. She had a close
friend when she was at primary school, but when
she moved to secondary school at the age of 11 ,
that friend no longer wanted to hang out with her.
She found it hard to make new friends and
withdrew into herself. “I just started talking less
and less, to the point where eventually it became
a weird thing for me to talk,” she explains. “So, I
just kind of tried not to. I didn’t really talk anymore,
because that became normal for me. And I didn’t
want to do anything that would stand out as
‘Oh, look, she’s talking now’. So, I was like: ‘Okay,
I’ll just be this person that doesn’t talk then.’ And
I was like that for years and years and years. Apart
from when I was at home, then I would talk a lot!”
Kim-Joy constantly worried about what other
people thought of her. Would they judge the sound
of her voice? “I got worried [at school] when I’d do
the register, about how my voice would come out.
To the point where teachers just looked at me
and were like: ‘Okay, she’s there.’ I just gave up.”
Her social anxiety built up to the point where
she didn’t even want to leave the house. “You justFor 2018 Great British Bake Off finalist Kim-Joy Hewlett,
baking was the route to overcoming shyness and anxiety
Words: Sarah Orme / Photography: Ellis Parrinderdon’t want to interact with anybody at all,” she
says, but moving to a new school at 16 for sixth
form gave her the chance to begin afresh.
“I wanted to start a new leaf and start talking
to people and reinvent myself almost – and just
become myself because I knew I wasn’t myself,”
she says. But she couldn’t shake off her social
anxiety. If she was going to meet up with someone,
she’d worry about what she was going to say while
she was with them.
“Afterwards, I’d reflect on what happened but
negatively and think: ‘Ooh, why did I say that?’”
she admits. “You just dissect everything. Like
the tiniest thing.” Then she would fret over each
meeting, picking over everything she’d said
and worrying that she’d offended her friends
without realising it.Rising in
confidence
Kim-Joy's bakes
are a way for her
to express
her emotions.