My Story

How I Became Who I Am

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to change my appearance. When I was younger, I remember telling my father I wanted to have light skin instead of the dark chocolate skin I was born with. My sister, who was lighter skinned and a year older, had already developed a superiority complex because of her complexion. I used to complain to my father that that was how I wanted to look, and I childishly cursed him for giving me this dark skin (my father and I have the same complexion, while my sister and my mother shared the same complexion). My dad helped me out by giving us nicknames. I was “The Bomb Chocolate Girl”, and my sister was “The Caramel Cow”. My father was the first person in my life that raised my confidence and took away any insecurities I had regarding my skin tone. The teasing and name-calling didn’t start until I was in middle school. Ignorant people would make remarks stating the obvious, “Wow, you’re so dark!”. As if I would look at my skin and say “Noooo way! I had no idea!”, like I really didn’t know. But I didn’t express that they bothered me. I hated when  people brought attention to my insecurities, but it was worse that they didn’t know. They didn’t know how ugly and inferior I felt. I was always comparing myself to the prettier girls in my school, wishing that I could look like them. When I started high school, things picked up, I guess you could say. Although my school was predominantly white, we had students from all walks of life. When I was in 11th grade, one of my classmates who was an aspiring fashion designer asked me to model one of his pieces in a show. It was a fashion show that one of our local community colleges did annually, and it turned out to be a huge production. It was the first time I really put thought into modeling. After that. stylists and photographers I met at the show started contacting me to do photo shoots and shows for them. I built my portfolio by doing TFP (Time for Photos) photo shoots and gained exposue that way. Ever since then I've been free lance modeling and hope to be signed by an agency soon.