God Bless This Mess(26)

All of a sudden I was appearing in parades as a pageant winner. They asked me to show up at community service events while I started prepping for the big Cinderella pageant in Dallas, where I would compete against girls who had done this their whole lives; girls who would go on to become Miss USA, and even Miss America. And the top prize was a $10,000 scholarship!

It took up so much time, my mom was like, “What did we get ourselves into?”

It was all so new to me, I didn’t expect to win, and I didn’t. I didn’t place in the Top 10 in Dallas, but I placed in the International Beauty category, and I won the Cover Girl award. All of these adults and officials at the pageant told me, “You should continue doing this. You just need to be a little bit more polished.”

My mom loved that it was something that we could do together, and so did I. Everyone was so encouraging. How could I not do what they said? I decided that pageants would be my thing.

I entered the Miss Alabama Teen USA pageant, which didn’t include a talent portion, and I placed second runner-up right out of the gate. I was so excited!

Next I signed up for the Miss Alabama’s Outstanding Teen pageant, and in my very first year I made Top 10. Top 10! My first year! At sixteen years old.

I entered again at age seventeen, knowing that if I won, I would receive a full-ride scholarship to college. My mom got me some professional coaching. I worked hard. I practiced speaking all the time. I put together a whole new dance routine, even though I was sick and tired of dance competitions and had decided to quit so I could focus full-time on pageants.

I went into that pageant with high expectations. I had all sorts of encouragement from my mom and from some of the pageant organizers, and all of these people who told me I could win it. I was a natural, they said. I was meant for this! And I made the Top 10. I even made the Top 5!

But I ended up getting first runner-up.

I was excited and devastated in the very same moment. The girl who beat me, her mom had been Miss Alabama, and her sister had been Miss Alabama Teen. She was fourteen. I won the onstage evening competition, which included the onstage question, but she won the talent competition. She was very talented, and I just wasn’t the most confident dancer. I’d been put in the back in dance class for a reason, it seemed. People in the pageant world told me I needed to get better at dancing if I wanted to win.

I didn’t give up. I truly thought I was going to be Miss America someday. That was my dream. So at the age of seventeen, I started competing with twenty-six-year-olds in the pageants that fed into the Miss America competition.

It was a big leap to go up against girls who had a decade or more on me when it came to competing in pageants. But I did really well. I won Miss Tuscaloosa, which was what I needed to do to get to the state level, and I thought I was on my way to making my Miss America dream come true.

That’s not what happened.

I wanted it so bad, and I worked at it so hard, that I made it to the Miss Alabama pageant the next three years in a row—and all three years, I failed to make the Top 10.

I couldn’t figure it out. Why did I keep doing well and winning when I was younger? It seemed like the more polishing I got, the worse I did. I kept asking myself, What’s wrong with me?

Everybody told me that pageants were a pay-your-dues thing. “Nobody wins until they’ve done it for four years or more,” they said. “Pay your dues, pay your dues.” Judges, organizers, and even some of the older girls told me, “You’re beautiful, try again, you’re still young.” But year after year, I felt more and more beat down.

Maybe I would have received that message better at twenty-two, after I’d finished college and grown up a little bit. But starting at seventeen, it made me feel so insecure. My self-worth just disappeared.

For the statewide Miss Alabama pageant, all of the contestants have to go to Birmingham for a week of rehearsals and preparations. They put us up in dorm rooms, where they took away our phones. We were completely isolated. (Not unlike the conditions I faced on The Bachelor a few years later, though at least then I was in a mansion instead of a dormitory.)

In that environment, it was easy for the other girls to get inside my head. Instead of feeling confident about the choices I’d made, I would look left and right at what everyone else was wearing and think, I don’t like my outfit now.

What I failed to recognize was that the more desperate to win I became, the more I changed myself to try to match what I saw as winning. Year after year I tried to copy how the winners dressed, how they looked, the way they answered their questions.

I watched girls getting ready for their interviews, carrying binders. I didn’t have a binder. So I got up early and watched CNN and obsessively took notes to get prepared for world affairs questions. I got so stressed out about being asked, “What do you want to do in the world?” at an age when I truly didn’t know.

I still loved getting dressed up. I loved looking beautiful. I loved serving my community. I loved being onstage. All of those parts were fun. Pageants were sometimes a beautiful and empowering thing for me. I learned so much, and the recognition wasn’t even about the applause for me. Under those big bright lights, I could hardly see the audience. There was just something about being up there onstage that felt right to me. As if that was the place I was supposed to be.

What I did not love was the pressure.

After coming so far and getting so close to the top in the teen pageants, winning was the thing I was supposed to do—yet I wasn’t even making Top 10.