On Being Told There Was
No Space for You —
And Going Anyway at 19.

The first time someone in New York looked me up and down and told me I wasn't what they were looking for, I was nineteen years old and standing in a hallway I had traveled eight hundred miles to stand in. I had taken a bus. I had borrowed money. I had left Alabama with the specific and terrifying belief that I was supposed to be there — and within the first twenty minutes of arriving, someone who didn't know my name or my story or where I had come from had already decided I wasn't worth the conversation.

That was not the last time. Not even close.

I want to be honest about what it felt like to be nineteen and Black and from Birmingham, Alabama, standing in the fashion industry in New York. It felt like being the only person in a room who hadn't gotten the memo that the room wasn't meant for you. Everyone else seemed to move through the space with a kind of ease that had nothing to do with talent and everything to do with familiarity — with having grown up seeing people who looked like them in the magazines, in the agencies, behind the cameras. I had not grown up seeing that. I grew up seeing it could be possible, because women like Erika White had shown me. But possible and present are two very different things.

What "there is no space for you" actually sounds like.

Nobody said those exact words. That is what I want you to understand. Nobody stood in front of me and announced their intentions. 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 the 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. The point was that I was the wrong shape for a silhouette the industry had already decided on, and that silhouette did not include a tall Black woman from Birmingham, Alabama who had the nerve to show up with her portfolio and her hopes and her borrowed money.

I pressed on anyway.

I want to say that clearly before I say anything else. I pressed on. Not because I was fearless — I was not. Not because I didn't feel every dismissal in my body — I felt each one, some of them for days afterward. But because I had made a decision before I got on that bus that I was not going to let the comfort of staying home become a reason to abandon something I believed in. And I believed, with the specific irrational conviction of a nineteen-year-old who has been told she has something — I believed I had something.

"Nobody said there is no space for you. They said it in the way they looked past me. In the casting calls where I was moved through quickly, politely, without any of the extended conversation I watched happen with other girls."

What Alabama looks like from a New York casting room.

There is a particular kind of condescension that the fashion industry reserves for people who come from places it does not consider relevant. New York does not think about Birmingham. Los Angeles does not think about Birmingham. The industry, in its self-referential way, produces and consumes its own geography — certain cities, certain schools, certain agencies — and everything outside that map is considered regional at best, quaint at worst. I did not know this going in. Or rather, I knew it the way you know something intellectually without having felt it yet. By the end of my first week in New York, I had felt it.

I was asked more than once where I was from. When I said Birmingham, Alabama, the response was usually a brief smile that communicated something I was not supposed to understand but did. It was not hostility. It was something more dismissive than hostility — it was the casual certainty that my geography had already answered something about my potential. That a girl from Alabama, however tall, however striking, however prepared, was not quite the thing they were assembling. The thing they were assembling had a different origin story.

I called home from a payphone once — I am telling you this so you understand the era, the specific financial reality of a nineteen-year-old from Birmingham who had saved carefully and was still running thin — and I told my mother that I wasn't sure it was going the way I had hoped. She asked what was happening. I tried to explain. She listened. And then she said something I have thought about many times since: she said, "The fact that you are there is the thing. Don't let them make the fact that you are there feel like nothing."

She was right. And I knew she was right. And it still took everything I had to get up the next morning and go back.

What it cost — and I am not talking about money.

There is a tax that the industry levies on women who don't fit its preferred template, and it is not a financial one — or not only a financial one. It is a psychological tax. It is the cost of maintaining your belief in yourself in an environment that is actively, if subtly, trying to narrow it. Every dismissal is a small withdrawal from a account you cannot afford to run dry. Every room where you are looked through rather than looked at asks you a question you have to answer again: do you actually believe you belong here, or were you wrong about yourself all along?

I was nineteen. I did not have the language for what was happening to me. I did not have the framework to name medical racism or systemic bias or the documented whiteness of the industry's preferred aesthetic. I just knew that I felt smaller at the end of some days than I had at the beginning, and that feeling smaller was something I had to actively fight against because if I let it compound, I would go home and I would not come back.

So I fought it. I fought it by remembering Erika White's voice. By remembering what she had told us in that room in Ensley — that we were there to do a job, not to be liked. That professionalism was its own kind of protection. That you could walk into a room where no one wanted you there and still walk like you had every right to the floor beneath your feet. She had taught me that. I carried it like armor.

I also fought it by being honest with myself about what I could and could not control. I could not control the fact that the industry had a vision of itself that didn't naturally include me. I could not control the casting directors who had made their minds up before I walked through the door. What I could control was the quality of my presence in every room I entered. The preparation. The professionalism. The walk. The way I treated every single person in every space, from the woman at the front desk to the photographer to the creative director who I knew, before I sat down, was not going to book me. I treated all of them the same. I showed up early. I left a thank you note. I did the job.

"I could not control the fact that the industry had a vision of itself that didn't naturally include me. What I could control was the quality of my presence in every room I entered. The preparation. The professionalism. The walk."

What pressing on actually means.

I want to be careful here, because I have heard the press-on narrative weaponized. I have heard it used to tell women — particularly Black women — that the problem is not the system but their own insufficient persistence. That if you just work harder, show up earlier, smile wider, endure more, the industry will eventually relent and make space for you. I do not believe that. I did not believe it at nineteen and I do not believe it now.

What I believe is something more specific: that going anyway — when the door is closed, when the room is cold, when the feedback is designed to discourage rather than develop — is worth it not because it will necessarily open the door. Sometimes it won't. Sometimes the door stays closed and the industry moves on without you and you have to find another door or build one yourself. 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.

I came home from New York changed. Not because I had conquered anything. Not because the industry had welcomed me. But because I had gone. I had stood in those rooms. I had been dismissed and I had come back the next day. I had been made to feel small and I had refused to stay small. I had done all of that at nineteen years old with a bus ticket and borrowed money and the voice of a mentor from Ensley in my head telling me to walk like I had every right to the floor beneath my feet.

That is a thing nobody can take from you. The fact that you went. The fact that you stood there.

What I carried back to Birmingham — and what I did with it.

When I came back to Alabama, I came back with something I had not had before. Not a contract. Not a booking. Not a single tangible proof that the trip had succeeded by any conventional measure. What I had was a clearer understanding of what the industry actually was — not the fantasy version I had grown up seeing in magazines, but the actual architecture of it. Who holds the power. Who makes the decisions. What the preferences are and where they come from and how deeply they run. I came back knowing all of that. And knowing it made me more effective, not less.

I came back and I kept working. I kept building my portfolio with Michael Carson. I kept doing the shows, the editorials, the commercial work. I went back to New York. I went to Atlanta. I built relationships with designers who were willing to see something the bigger agencies weren't ready to see yet. I walked for Christian Siriano at Gus Mayer. I walked for Rebecca Minkoff. I appeared in film and on television. I was signed with Click Models Atlanta. I landed magazine covers in my home state.

None of that happened because the industry changed its mind about what it wanted. It happened because I did not let what the industry wanted become the ceiling of what I was willing to try.

For every young woman reading this who has been told the same thing.

I write this for you specifically. Not for the woman who has had every door opened and every room arranged to receive her — she does not need this. I write it for the woman who was told the room wasn't built for her. The woman who got on the bus anyway. The woman who is reading this in a city the industry doesn't think about, with a dream the industry hasn't sanctioned, with a body or a background or a face or a geography that the current version of the industry has decided doesn't fit.

Here is what I want to tell her: the dismissal is not information about you. I know it feels like information. I know the way it lands in your chest and sits there. I know how it accumulates. But the specific preferences of an industry that spent decades excluding almost everyone who looked like us is not a reliable guide to what you are capable of or what you are worth or what you will eventually build.

Go anyway. Go with your eyes open — don't romanticize it, don't pretend it won't cost you something, don't let anyone sell you the version of this story where persistence alone is enough to overcome every structural barrier. It isn't. Some doors will stay closed. Some rooms will never be truly welcoming. All of that is true and none of it is a reason not to go.

Because here is the other truth: the industry is not the only place you can build something. It is not the only place your talent can land. And the women who figure that out — who use what the industry taught them without being imprisoned by what the industry wanted them to be — those are the women who end up building things that outlast any single casting call or magazine cover or season.

I left Alabama at nineteen. I was told there was no space for me. I stayed in those rooms longer than they wanted me to. I came home. I kept going. I am still going.

The fact that I went is the thing. And the fact that you go — whatever door you are standing in front of right now, whatever voice is telling you there is no space — the fact that you go is the thing too.

Don't let anyone make that feel like nothing.