last night, i was lamenting to my fiancé that modeling takes up such a frustrating, strange real estate in my mind. not enough that i'll do whatever it takes to get better and get opportunities, but just enough that i can't seem to ever fully give up—despite being too scared to do what it would take to get better outside of the few opportunities i do get.
he scrunched his face in confusion. "aren't you doing it now?" he asked, because i literally have a photoshoot coming up on wednesday. "yeah, i guess so..." but i should have been doing more! i should have practiced posing so that i would be sure i wouldn't screw this one up. i've been modeling for four years, you'd think by now i'd be confident in my ability to pose—but you'd be wrong; in truth i haven't really needed to get better at posing. for runway it's simply less important; it doesn't carry the whole show like with a photoshoot, and in the four years i've been modeling, i've only done that one very first photoshoot back in 2022!
(as a side note, maybe calling it four years is a bit unfair to myself; yes it has been four calendar years, but i only did one thing in 2022 and one or two things in 2023; it was really only in 2024 that things picked up and i was modeling with any real frequency. when i talk to people about language learning i often say it's not about the years you've been learning, it's more about the hours you'e put in; but i guess it's hard to transfer that perspective to this domain for myself.)
i think i was feeling particularly down on myself yesterday as a sort of emotional whiplash from the success of getting the gig on wednesday. throughout my modeling journey, i've discovered a pattern where sometimes feel ugly or inadequate is a defense mechanism against the amount of attention that's involved in being a model—the emotional aftermath after my first fashion show was almost enough to make me never want to model again.
so it makes sense that i would actually be feeling worse right after finally finding some success—i'm terrified to go through with it and possibly do badly, so perhaps part of me is trying to convince me not to try at all.
after all this, today i wake up to a voice message. it's the organizer of the cluster of fashion shows i did late last summer. at the time, she had told me that designers often reach out to her needing models, and that whenever she sends them some, she makes sure it's a paid gig, even if the pay is low. i figured the message now would be asking me to participate in this year's summer cluster of shows.
i think about procrastinating listening to the message, but instead i click it open before any fear can convince me otherwise. she asks if i would like to do a fashion show in april! i respond affirmatively and she says it will be paid, though low.
i actually can't believe it. one little voice message, and all of my doubts have been directly addressed. one of them, namely: she's not picking me out of desperation—the show is weeks away. i had been minimizing my wednesday gig by saying she probably just settled for me out of desperation, needing any body at all, even if she wouldn't have ever picked me otherwise.
another was that sure, i broke into this network of incredibly talented designers and models and organizers in berlin, but that i was the worst of them and every thinks i'm a terrible model but nice enough to keep around. i thought surely she would exhaust her network before even approaching me; though maybe she has, but that she asked me at all expels that worry for now.
it would be super cool if, moving forward, i could stop agonizing about modeling, and focus on just doing it or not. though i don't think that will happen, so perhaps instead, i will at least give up so dramatically and entirely that the world cannot help but conspire to make me reconsider.
No comments:
Post a Comment