TRUE SELF

ELLE Canada, February 2014

When a modeling agency offered me a two-month contract in Hong Kong, I asked my best friend where to find it on a map. At fourteen, I’d never been more than five hundred miles from home. My family had only recently moved from the small town of Squamish (population 15,000) to Vancouver when an agent my mother met by chance signed me as a model. Within months, I was on the other side of the Pacific attending castings in the pink prairie skirt I’d sewn myself in home economics.

My mom was with me on my first photo shoot in Vancouver—holding a blanket up to shield my body from strangers while I changed in a public park—and she went with me to Hong Kong. It was her first time abroad as well, but together we made sense of the transit system, eventually finding our way to castings and appointments at the agency. “Unprofessional,” my agents chastised us—I should be able to do things on my own; it was part of the job description. My mom accompanied me to dozens of castings, but soon I began to navigate the city—and my career—alone.

Modeling was my first job. Without it, I probably would have earned my first paychecks at Tim Horton’s, like most of the kids I grew up with. But modeling offered more than money; it opened the world to me, and all of my firsts became more exciting by nature of where they happened. I got drunk for the first time in Hong Kong and smoked pot for the first time in Tokyo—the city where I also lost my virginity, to a blue-eyed Brit who sang me Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” and doodled comics in my sketchbook.

In New York at sixteen, I cringed when agents commended models’ weight loss like proud parents. From Paris, I called my mom in tears, distraught over the frailty of the girls I lived with—one hardly ate, and new bruises seemed to be always blooming on her limbs. Many of the girls I shared rooms with no longer got their periods. “I guess the battle is to not let their problems become yours,” my mom wrote in response to one of my e-mails. I resolved not to—an easy task for a seventeen-year-old idealist. But by eighteen, my perspective would change; I’d come to see the loss of my period as an accomplishment, proof of my tenacity.

I left home immediately after my last high school exam, eager to model full-time and earn financial independence from my parents; their relationship was crumbling, and I wanted to be far from home when the floor fell through. I worked with agents to arrange contracts that kept me abroad for seven months in 2008, just as the world economy slid into a recession.

When I returned home for the holidays, to the townhouse where my mother no longer lived with my father, I weighed less than I had at thirteen. I wore tights folded down over the waistband of my jeans to hold them up, and my winter jacket wrapped around my body one-and-a-half times when unzipped.

The money I made modeling quickly disappeared, most of it spent on flights, apartments, and appointments with personal trainers who specialized in working with models and actresses. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you you’re not beautiful; you are,” one told me, “but there are some things we’re going to have to work on to get you into model shape.” I stood in front of a full-length mirror while he pointed out the width and musculature of my shoulders, thickness of my thighs, and disproportionate shortness of my shinbones. For cardio, he had me pedal backwards on an elliptical machine.

Three years after graduation, I’d filled one passport and been issued a new, thicker one. I’d also become the same kind of model I’d once called home about, someone obsessed with calorie calculations and burdened with feelings of worthlessness, forever striving to live up to the photoshopped version of herself. The more modeling offered me—cities, money, prestige—the more I was willing to sacrifice in exchange. I reasoned that my health could be regained, my education could wait and my friends and family would forgive my absences.

I was happiest when I was on set, so the sacrifices I made seemed worthwhile. Until I no longer saw the cities I walked through, too preoccupied with staying thin to appreciate the world outside my skin; too caught up in my own thoughts and anxieties to even hold a conversation. Bookings began to unhinge me: the minute I confirmed a job, my mind flooded with endless thoughts of what to eat and what not to eat and the softness of my stomach and the bow of my legs and the fat beneath my skin. I felt trapped in my own head, powerless and yearning for the escape that came only with the end of each shoot.

My breaking point was invisible, nothing anyone else could pinpoint, but as clear and precise to me as the snapping of a bone. In the middle of December, I received an e-mail asking if I was available for a shoot in San Francisco at the end of the month: for a day’s work, I’d be paid $2,500. A year earlier, I would have said yes immediately. But this time I wavered. I’d begun to worry that all the things I’d sacrificed had already slipped beyond my reach, and I knew the mental torture I’d put myself through in the coming weeks would be only lead me further from them. But what terrified me the most was the fear that this time, once the thoughts began, they might never end. And nothing, no thousand or two thousand dollars, was worth that risk.

I turned the job down, and every offer that followed it. I cut ties with my agencies and fell out of touch with everyone I’d met in the industry. I felt lost. I stopped wearing makeup, skirts, and heels, eschewing everything I associated with the profession I’d left behind. When I went to the dentist, he told me that the vitamin C tablets I’d been eating to suppress my appetite had eroded my teeth; I needed thirteen fillings. I researched eating disorder treatments, but they seemed expensive and intimidating—thankfully, I’d eventually find recovery on my own. At twenty-two, with no transferable skills, I got a minimum wage job chopping vegetables in a kitchen, and in many ways, I felt like I was fourteen again, just learning how to be my own person.

I fell in love with creative writing in my second year of university—when I wrote, I felt complete, and completely myself. I was grateful for every day I went to class instead of castings and every moment I was assessed on the basis of my ideas instead of my appearance. I spent endless hours struggling with words—writing felt like the hardest thing I’d ever done, and still does. But when I write, I am more than a prop in someone else’s story; I’m the storyteller, and I can create whatever I want to see in the world. To me, this is the sweetest, most immense freedom.

When I stepped away from modeling, I didn’t know where my feet would land. It felt like falling or floating, but I wasn’t sure which. In the years since, the industry has faded from view, my time in it becoming just another complicated chapter in the messy story of my life. I look in the mirror and know I’ve become exactly what I feared throughout my career—a woman incompatible with the modeling world, unwanted by its gatekeepers. At yet I find myself closer than ever to the person I’ve always wanted to be.