this photo above was taken of me when I was 15 and worked for Elite NY.
This story originally appeared on Medium, however, I have modified some parts, rewriting them.
The truth is, I think the only two reasons I didn't slip through the cracks is because I come from an affluent white family. My family scooped me up when I fell down, over and over again.
Unlike a lot of people who make their mistakes early in life, I waited until my late 30's and early 40's to screw up. As a child, I was an obedient, straight A student. I did well in college, too. One of my professors was so impressed with my comedic writing that he asked me to be a research assistant. I had a decent social life and seemed to be on track in many respects. There are a number of theories I have as to why I've fallen apart several times in life, but that will be a different post. My troubles, however, seem to arise from my delicately balanced emotional system that is extremely prone to bad environments. I'm a sponge and I never learned how to defend myself emotionally. I'm working on this now, though.
My parents allowed me to think freely and to believe I deserved good things in life. Here’s what my life looked like as a kid and teenager, before I fucked it up as an adult:
When I was a child and into my teens, I never thought about money at all.
I didn’t know where it came from, how it got to me or how its flow was maintained. My father was an anesthesiologist and made over $100,000 per year. He wasn’t a millionaire and we didn’t have lavish things like yachts but we went on vacations in Europe, cruises in the Caribbean and I was given whatever I wanted as far as material possessions were concerned.
My mother bought me new clothes at department stores and I was given whatever I wanted. There was nothing I longed for that I didn’t get. My parents bought me a car when I turned 16 and they paid for my college tuition.
We frequently ate out at restaurants, fancy ones sometimes where I would order steak and lobster, or brie, or whatever I wanted. I could order dessert and not concern myself with how much it cost. I was a happy, content child.
But I was shy and frequently mumbled to myself.
I was scared of people and remember vividly hiding upstairs when someone rang the doorbell. I’d hover over the stairway, listening to the conversations. Anything I created, like a drawing was immediately stuffed under my mattress. I was terrified of anyone seeing what was inside me.
I was secretive to an extreme degree.
I had to quit ballet because one day, when the ballet teacher instructed us to dance in freeform-style, like however we wanted to, I froze. I continued to be frozen, standing alone in the middle of the ballet room, unable to move, panicking more by the second as I watched the other free-spirited girls danced around me. I panicked big time. It was so traumatic that I begged my mom to never return to ballet class. I never went back. This pattern has sort of repeated itself throughout my whole life. I panic, then quit.
One summer when I was around 8 years old, I refused to go anywhere without wearing a long, brown winter coat. I felt naked without something covering my arms and legs and it became my security blanket. I ran relay races in that brown coat and remember getting really overheated. I refused to ever take it off for about a year (except for baths).
The upper middle-class comforts paled in comparison to the riches I ran into when I became a high fashion model with Elite.
At age 15, I started professionally modeling and making a lot of money.
I worked in Chicago and Tokyo, Japan. I found myself surrounded by money everywhere I went. My new world was defined by money and greed, lots of greed.
I began to develop a mindset of privilege. I began expecting to get whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.
I was so careless with money. I remember one time in Tokyo when I was working as an Elite model at age 17, I temporarily ran out of cash on the weekend. I had forgotten to advance money to my bank account on Friday. This was not a big deal, as I knew I could ask one of the models to give me an advance.
One of the male models with whom I worked handed me $300 when I told him I forgot to fill my account. Money was everywhere and I didn’t concern myself with it at all. The other thing about money: once you have it, and it’s all around you, free things are thrown your way constantly.
It seems the more you have, the more comes your way without cost.
In Japan, all the models gained free entry into the most exclusive nightclubs (Lexington Queen at the time). We were also given 2 free drinks each night. That club was pretty expensive to get into, but not for us. This sort of treatment started working its way deep into my subconscious. I started to believe I was above everyone else, including the law.
This sort of lifestyle doesn’t lend itself to deep thinking. After I made well over $20,000 within three months in Tokyo, I noticed myself becoming more and more consumed by thoughts of losing it. I began to worry about people stealing it, robbing me, taking my treasures away.
It made me nervous to have all that money.
In order to evade taxes, the other models taught me to wire the money to US banks in bundles less than $10,000. That way, the authorities wouldn’t be suspicious about it. I followed their advice and wired my money back to the USA in bundles of $10k. I never had any problems with the IRS.
No government agency made me pay taxes on it. When you suddenly become rich, you rely on those around you to prevent you from losing it. That’s how it works. You start to become consumed by thoughts of it disappearing. You never want it to go because it represents leisure, comfort and pleasure.
It represents your new way of life.
You stop paying attention to the homeless man on the street and you tend to think other people are poor because they’re losers.
The worst part of becoming rich is you stop thinking about poor people altogether. They don’t exist for you. That is the real tragedy of becoming wealthy.
I guess the apex of my rich life arrived when I went to Spago in Hollywood with my artist boyfriend’s family. You can’t just walk into Spago and expect to be served dinner.
No, you have to be somebody in order to gain access.
Waiting in line outside the restaurant was a humiliating experience. The doorman’s job was to sniff out the fakes, the undesirables, the nobodys. I felt like a fraud. I was a girl from the midwest who had done nothing of merit. But I knew people who knew famous people. I was safe.
My boyfriend’s mother was a travel agent and her clients were famous celebrities. I was 18 and had only just started drinking alcohol. There was one aspect of me that was not characteristic of a rich girl: I usually wore white t-shirts and army pants with no make-up or jewelry.
I wasn’t big into fashion then or now. I remember my boyfriend wanted me to wear dresses. For some reason, I didn’t want to. I didn’t like feeling vulnerable. Wearing dresses was equated with feeling vulnerable in my mind, for some reason. I’m still the same way today.
At Spago, I was given as many glasses of wine as I wanted to drink. I got really wasted and as I looked around the restaurant, I saw Sylvester Stallone and my drunk double-vision produced 2 Matt Dillons. I kept repeating myself, “Why are there 2 Matt Dillons???”
I felt out of place among these high-profile rich people.
After eating fancy pizzas with ingredients I couldn’t pronounce and drinking five glasses of wine, I ran out of the restaurant and PUKED in the bushes in front of the restaurant.
My boyfriend’s mother thought I was so cool for doing that.
She died laughing, “You puked at Spago!!!!!!”
I thought she was silly. I didn’t do it to be cool, I did it because my 18 year-old body wasn’t used to being given alcohol in public!
I wanted to impress everyone and make them believe I could hold my liquor. What a joke.
I don’t know how to end this. I’ve spent a lot of time being broke after I quit modeling. It’s only recently that I’ve been learning how money operates. I’ve spent a great deal of my adult life experimenting, learning and creating stuff. I feel like a child still.
I pretty much lost everything in the recession, so now I have a lot in common with a lot of people who are also in debt or broke. My family and I are much closer now that we're near the edge of poverty. I’m grateful that poverty and loss brought us together.
If I was rich, my daughter wouldn’t have bonded so closely to her grandparents. I’m sure my daughter has extended the life of my father. This makes me so happy. I’m happy that I could help create someone who brings my parents so much joy.
I’d make for a much better rich person if it happened again today. My awareness has changed dramatically and I’m no longer scared by the idea of losing it all. I’ve already lost it all and I’m still alive. And I don’t enjoy being poor.
Being poor sometimes means I have to work for assholes just to pay bills.
I’m eccentric and have a wild imagination that is dying to break free in massive ways.