When most of my friends were having fun at the beach, I was sitting in my room while Andrea and Justin (photographer and assistant) yanked and stuffed a black t-shirt in my hair and Caroline, the makeup artist with the makeup bag that’s literally a suitcase, drew on my face. An hour later, the photo shoot was on its way…
When I was in high school, I was a huge fan of the reality TV show “America’s next top model”. I watched it every time it was on and never missed a single episode of the show. While envying the models on the show, I would always wonder about the glamorous and exciting events that models attend regularly in their lives. Suddenly, a thought formed in my head – what if I could do something like that? Then the little voice inside of me said: “come on, you can’t be serious! Look at yourself! You’re skinny enough, but you would never be tall enough to become a model. Models have to be at least 5’8 and unless there’s a miracle, you will never reach that height.” And just like that, the thought of me becoming a model vanished.
Then, during my freshman year of college, I heard some bad news of an old friend. She had moved to New York in high school, but we still kept in touch. But one day, I got an email from her brother saying that she passed away recently because of the swine flu. I was devastated because even though she moved to New York, she was still my friend and we always found time to catch up once in a while but now she’s gone just like that. The shock of losing someone so fast and the sadness of this tragedy made me think about my own life. I began wondering about the what ifs. What if something like this happened to me? What if I never get the opportunity to do something I like again? What if I have to live with regrets for the rest of my life? At that moment, I realized that life is too short to not do something you want to do because you are afraid of failing. Instead of thinking that modeling is what I like, I wanted to see for myself that this is truly what I like. So I decided to give myself a chance at modeling regardless of the problem with my height.
It’s been almost a year since I made that decision and words can’t describe how glad I am that I did. For the past year or so, I’ve learned so much about the industry and worked with many talented photographers, makeup artists, hair stylists, and clothing designers. I now realized that worrying about my height was just my excuse because I was afraid of trying new things.
So why do I do what I do? Because I’m afraid of never getting a chance again and life is too short to be holding back.
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