I tried modeling. Not very hard.. but I did. Because of the gawking comments I’ve collected from a billion strangers over the years- “Are you a model? You should be!” -I expected an easy ride. Instead, I felt like a shiny pinball, being bounced between praise & rejection and from unrealistic expectation to validation for all the wrong reasons. I remember how my heart broke when the two spots on my face that my momma had called “beauty marks” were treated as flaws and covered with makeup. I remember noticing the bags under my eyes for the first time ever, and looking at younger photos of myself trying to figure out where it all went wrong and hoping that photoshop could “fix” them. I remember the day that the stretch marks horizontally traversing my back, documenting the development of my beautifully rare, 6ft, stature came under attack. That was the day I decided “This ain’t for me.”

I had, by this point, been advised to create separate social media accounts, for the purpose of being left void of any undesirable pieces of me. Only poised, slim, prepared images and combed words should be posted. For a while it felt official, and crisp, and like good marketing… Then, it felt inauthentic. I thought, “Is this the light that I want to shine into the world?” That glamorous kind of light was enticing, but the closer I got to it, I burned from some harmful variation of UV that made my quirks and eccentricities invisible to the people that needed to see them most. If I were going to pursue this career to magazine covers and TV screens, it meant that some little freckled girl would hate her “beauty marks” while I pretended not to have them. It meant that some woman would be left ashamed of her stretch marks because she didn’t get the relief of seeing mine before they were photoshopped away and their absence served to her as beauty.

“Model”… This would be my job title. I would be the poster girl for the effortlessly refined humanoid who didn’t tell terrible jokes, or ever look fat in those jeans, or ever have a wash-and-go debacle or a pimple. My public presence would be a professionalized filtrate, boiled down from my messy reality. And I resolved that this type of “modeling” was not “doing what I love and loving what I do.” I love people, and their nuances and their stories and their scars. I love the real of people; the unedited. Putting away the things that make me one of them felt like a tidy betrayal and a denial of my purpose.

The experience led me to this much more broadly applicable conclusion: When what you love is inappropriate in the workplace, you are working in the wrong place. To say that “one’s professional life should be kept completely severed from ones personal life” is the antithesis of “love what you do, do what you love.” To make a living, we are oft called upon to play professionalism; a game of physical, emotional, psychological dress-up, where suit and tie are the chainmail between heart and work. Passion and imperfection on one side, the safe, auto-pilot grin of wage earning on the other – never to meet.

~Dear reader, sometimes we must play the game. Sometimes our survival is what stands between what we love and what we do. We gotta put food on the table, that’s reality. The encouragement I would like to offer you (and myself) is simply this.. Start where you are. Find happiness and peace there. And when you figure out what you love, use every resource within reach to feed that passion. Feed it until it feeds you.

Signed, The Professional Unprofessional