The Day Young Motswana Model Stepped Into New York City
Kaone Kario | Monday April 28, 2014 15:35
This is it. The new challenge I’d asked for, I told myself as I exited the plane. This is the clean slate I wanted, the fresh start.
This wasn’t my first time in NYC, so I was familiar with something things, like where to get a cab. I rock on over to get my luggage, strap myself up in my coat and gear up for the cold that’s about to embrace me.
The weather felt like a literal and metaphorical state of how this town would be, cold. I get into the cab, give the driver my address and proceed to explain that I have no idea how to get there, so could he please just do the thinking.
Working in New York was a dream I had given up many years prior to this day. I had heard about how hard it is, expensive, competitive.
I met models who loved and hated it .I thought wow, then why do you stay? Why do you keep coming back? I had also created this checklist in my head, if xyz (i.e big budget, thinner me) , were not in place I wouldn’t go to work in NYC. I wanted everything to be perfect.
It wasn’t.
I was very comfortable in Cape Town, maybe a little too comfortable. It was my home for many years, I had my clients, and my world was so wrapped up in that city that I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, until things fell apart. My world ended.
Professional and personal ties were severed so badly, I had to start over. In the years that I was based in South Africa, I had been through two agency liquidations.
The last one was the straw that broke the camels back.
I couldn’t believe this was happening to me, again. What was it about me that attracted agents who stole? I felt betrayed by the entire system.
I now know that my world had to end for me to discover a whole new and better one. Struggle can be colourful.
What my fears and doubts couldn’t drown out was my intense need for change. A new challenge. A fresh continuation, freedom from a world that only knew me a certain way. The space to define and create myself without everyone else’s voice.
Donald Millers said, “We don’t normally face our fears willingly. Usually, God has to woo us into the desert. We are either chasing love or some other desire, and we find ourselves in the midst of a situation in which we have very little control. And when we lose control, we go into a mild form of trauma.
But the good news is the greatest stories are lived in the desert. The great lives are lived in the places we most fear.
If we fear being rejected, the great story has us standing at the door with flowers in our hands, if we fear losing love, the great stories have us letting that person go rather than clinging to them. If we fear taking a chance on a dream, the great stories have us quitting our jobs.” (Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts.)
New York is my desert.