Writing

The morning it happened, I thought I was going to work. That is the thing I want you to understand first — I had no idea. I was wearing blue jeans and a black tank top, the way he had specifically told me to dress, and I had my heels in a bag in the backseat because he'd said to bring them. I assumed he meant we might need me to stand in as a height reference between sets. Photographers do that. That is what I thought the heels were for.

He got in the car and drove fast, toward Auburn Avenue. I was asking questions — where are we going, what is happening — and he was not answering. He pulled into a parking lot near the beltline, before the beltline became the thing it is now, and stopped the car.

“Put your heels on,” he said. I got the heels out of the backseat. I put them on. And then I walked fast to keep up with him across that parking lot, into a two-story outdoor complex. Still asking questions. Still not getting answers. Until we reached the door.

Click Models. That is what the door said.

Nobody said those exact words. That is what I want you to understand. The industry is far too sophisticated for that — and far too practiced. What they said was quieter and more corrosive. They said it in the way they looked past me in a room. In the casting calls where I was moved through quickly, politely, without any of the extended conversation I watched happen with other girls. In feedback that was never specific, never actionable — just a shapeless “not quite what we're looking for right now” that offered nothing to improve upon, because improvement wasn't really the point.

I want to be careful here, because I have heard the press-on narrative weaponized — used to tell women, particularly Black women, that the problem is not the system but their own insufficient persistence. I do not believe that. I did not at nineteen and I do not now.

What going anyway is worth is what it does to you. What it teaches you about your own capacity. What it deposits in you that nobody can take back.

The flyer arrives in a home. It gets left on a kitchen counter, carried to a store, handed to a neighbor. It has about four seconds to communicate everything important. There is no back button. There is no algorithm deciding who sees it. There is only the paper and the person and whatever you managed to put between them.

Every organization has someone who holds the room. Not the executive director. Not the board chair. The person who knows where the extension cord is kept and remembers that one donor prefers a phone call over email. The person whose departure, if it ever came, would cause three months of invisible chaos.

The businesses that endure are not always the best ones. They are the ones that made themselves legible to the people who needed them most. That is a design problem. It is a communications problem. It is, at its root, a story problem.