Like many people on this planet, when I was going through girlhood, I wanted to be a model. Tall and lean. In one occasion I drank so much milk I ended up throwing up. I was appalled in the next years when other people would made comments on my body (that I was rounder and that my body was deceitful when I was buying a pair of pants).
I always looked up at models for inspiration from Gisele Bundchen to Cindy Crawford. So when I heard the viral talk “Looks aren’t everything. Believe me, I’m a model” I was blown away with the candor with which Cameron Russell talked about a profession that didn’t always made her happy. I never thought of models as insecure beings and hearing so was a revelation because indeed having to worry about your appearance and body all the time can be an exhausting task.
Fast forward when Cameron created Interrupt mag, a very plural magazine designed to help change the status quo, I wrote a small article about loving my wrists (which could apply to my arms in general) because in my many weight fluctuations they tend to stay basically the same. I was so excited to receive my magazine in the mail with amazing stickers and a t-shirt. I felt like I belonged someplace.
Seeing her organizing work in Model Mafia and the Instagram campaign # My job should not include abuse made me in awe of her pursuit of a world with more justice.
I read voraciously her memoir “How to be agreeable herself to everyone” and the first few pages were like a punch in the stomach. I fell for that 16-year-old who only wanted to please and move forward with her career in a world of adults that told her she was utterly replaceable. It was like I was inside the mind of that model with a unisex name that turns into a very smart woman caught up in the nuances of the fashion industry. The one that knows that is paid very well at face value, that the garment workers do their job for a miserable wage and that, by her moral compass, is just not right.
Cameron, who tells everyone she wants to be one day President of the United States, hints sometimes at dissociation, which is a state when we are not fully present and suppress feelings and emotions. It’s like body, mind and spirit are not in sync.
Cameron talks from the get-go about her need to feel tough which applies in the fashion world where it’s valued “a girl that would do anything” and not any demonstrations of being upset which can be quickly labeled as weakness.
Being a part of something both aspirational and detrimental to mental health, Cameron Russell emphasized in her Ted Talk she just won a genetic lottery and that is not a career path, that more admirable would be a ninja cardio thoracic surgeon poet.
Nowadays along with being a mother, model and climate change activist, I think Cameron is aware of her voice and her power (her Ted Talk is one of the most viewed of all time) and she was recently on Moma on the panel “Grace under pressure”.
In the last chapter of her book, she talks about the family tradition of making quilts: out of something old we can always reshape, transform and create something new. Maybe we are all fragments of our past that conduct into our present for us to make sense. Writing is a way of making sense and sharing our stories. Acknowledging and owning it.
Cameron, thanks lovely lady!
Paula Gouveia