Some dreams arrive so early that, by the time the world notices them, they already feel old inside you. That is how it was for me. When I was still a little girl in primary school, I used to play fashion shows with my classmates. We would walk across the room as if it were a runway, trying to look serious, elegant, important. For most of them it was just a game. For me, it was something else entirely. Even then, I was not pretending. I could already see it in my mind with complete clarity — photographers in front of me, makeup artists giving me the final touch, beautiful couture dresses falling perfectly around my body, and that strange electric silence that exists just before the cameras begin.
I think some part of me always knew.
Of course, having a certain face helped. I am not naive about that. I know that my features opened doors for me, or at least made people stop and look twice. My face has always been called elegant, refined, “fashion,” and I understood quite early that this gave me a chance. But that was never the whole story. Beauty might attract attention, but it does not build a life on its own. What people do not always see is the work behind it — the waiting, the effort, the discipline, the uncertainty, and the stubbornness it takes to keep going when the dream is still much bigger than your reality.
I come from a small mountain village in Spain, the kind of place where life feels simple, direct, and close to the earth. It is beautiful in a way that does not need explanation. Clean air, quiet mornings, familiar faces, and that strong sense that the world is both very small and very far away at the same time. Growing up there gave me something important: roots. But it also made my dream feel even bigger. If I wanted this life, I knew I would have to leave the safety of what I knew and go looking for it.
So I did.
At first it meant long trips for castings, often exhausting ones, going to Madrid and Barcelona with hope packed into every bag. Then it became something larger. Milan, Paris, New York. Cities I had imagined long before I ever saw them, and then suddenly had to navigate for real, not as fantasy but as work, as ambition, as the place where I had to prove that I belonged there. There were moments of excitement, of course, and also moments of doubt. But I never forgot what I had seen so clearly when I was a child. I was not chasing a random idea. I was walking toward something that had been calling me for years.
And now, when I look at my life, I know I am living the one I always wanted. Not perfectly, not without sacrifice, but truly. I became what I dreamed of being: a real top model, with all the beauty and all the pressure that comes with it. And still, I never feel ashamed of where I started. Quite the opposite. My origins are part of my strength. Whenever I can, I go back to the mountains in Spain just to breathe that honest air again, to remember silence, distance, and the version of myself that existed before the world became so large.
But I also know this with certainty: my life will keep carrying me upward. That was always the direction.