Her Mission

Chapter 3: Expect the Unexpected

I found that I had unusually stretchy skin, almost too stretchy. It turned out that I had Elhers-Danlos Syndrome, or EDS, I had hyper-elastic skin, it also explain how I was so flexible, I was always pulling these impossible posses and bendy silhouettes for my photographs. However it also explained how sometimes I felt a lot of pain and felt so weak, I muscled through that pain because I knew my family needed me, but one day it had all become too much.

I was always so stressed because my mum kept demanding for more and more money for her business and my sisters insisted that I pay for them to go to modelling school. I sacrificed everything I could, even the money I had to buy my medication so I can stay in control of my illness, but it was still not enough! So one day I collapsed on the set of an important shoot and my agency learned about my condition, they fired me!

They said they can't have me be liability and that if other agencies found out that their star model was only getting the top jobs because of an illness, that those agencies would accuse them for using my illness as a bargaining chip. I didn't know what to do! I had to go home defeated, I cried into my pillow that whole night alone, not one of my family members helped comfort me. Instead, when they found out, they only blamed me, telling me that they knew I wasn't good enough to be a model and that the only reason that I got the job in the first place was because I was tall, which was true, but i didn't want to admit that.

It was really hard for me to find a job, going back on the fact that I dropped out of school, I put on a brave face for my family and set out to find another job, but nobody would hire a high-school drop out who had no skills but modelling, and when they found that I was suffering from an illness, they only rejected me faster. There was only one place that offered my a job, a small diner owned by a kind old lady.