I grew up poor and used to look at people in big houses and thought they had everything. Then later on I looked at models in magazines and thought they had it all.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There were a few models who used to stay close to my building. I used to admire them and tell my friends that I did. Those models told me get into modeling.
I became obsessed watching fashion TV shows when I was a teenager and recognized that I had the height and body frame. I especially became hooked when I saw on 'E! True Hollywood Story' how much a model can make and how I can achieve a better living for my family and me.
During my adolescence, our family dwelt in rural Alaska. We were dirt poor, Depression-era poor. Tarpaper shack and kerosene lamps. In those days I read because that's all I had. I wrote because that's all I had.
I was a model for eight years. That's the deal: People look. But I didn't like being looked at and never seen.
From the age of five, I was organizing everybody's everything. If I didn't like the way it looked, I'd rearrange it. From a very early age, I saw life from my point of view.
I would never become a big, big model in the commercial sense because I was such a type; you couldn't use me in everything.
I wanted to model when I was younger.
Nobody in my family ever thought that I'd a be a model.
Living in Georgia, I never wanted to model. But I had the travel bug big time when I was young. I think because I had an all-American look, I was great for catalogs. They constantly sent me overseas for editorial, but I would always come back with catalog jobs. I was fine with that. It served my purpose to see the world.
At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.