Browsing articles from "August, 2011"

All You Need is a Plan

Aug 30, 2011 // by Chaise Candie // Blog //

I was always a sucker for the “you can be anything you want” slogan, but I knew from a very young age that there had to be more to it. After all, everyone wants to be a doctor or a lawyer when they’re 5, but only a few actually become one. At 14 I decided I wanted to be a model, I knew it was a career I could start right away, but I also knew I couldn’t just wish it into reality. So I sat on my computer and looked up how to become a model. Easy right? Not quite, but I singled out what seemed to make the most sense and started doing everything I could to make it happen.

Today, years later I am so grateful to be exactly where I am. Sometimes I feel like I’m never satisfied, but when I stop to look around me, I truly appreciate everything I’ve accomplished. I remember when I was 17, I landed this awesome job as a waitress in South Beach, right on Ocean Drive. That whole year I drove back and forth from Hialeah everyday for work and for castings, to this seemingly different world. It wasn’t so much the glitzy nightlife that made it different. It was the fact that on a daily basis I was meeting people from all around the world with so many different cultures. Maybe that doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but for someone who’d never gone anywhere and lived in the same city all their life, it was as if all of a sudden, my world became that much bigger.

I don’t quite know how to explain it. I had this primitive feeling that “If these people could come here to visit, then I can go there to visit.” Kinda silly, I know, but it was really that simple. The fact that I was a poor girl from the projects in Hialeah had nothing to do with anything. The dreams I had as a child were suddenly possible again. I knew I just needed to follow my plan.

I remember coming over the causeway looking out into the water and saying, one day I’ll live here. I did what I set out to do and now I’m here…I’ve traveled all around the world. I made it real. Somehow someway I wrote my own story, consciously, decisively, fearlessly.