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When I was younger I wanted to be a doctor. I loved school and learning and my parents noticed that I was intelligent from an early age. I remember in the third or fourth grade, we took a plane trip somewhere and during the flight I memorized the periodic table for fun.
But when I reached sixth grade, I had one teacher who really made me lose interest in school. This guy was just super absent; he went to class and did as little as possible. I became more focused on the social environment rather than learning and paying attention to the teacher.
When I was around thirteen, my parents got divorced and I moved to a more rural area in Massachusetts. I started acting out and my parents suspected I may have ADHD. They took me to get tested and as part of the process, I took an intelligence assessment, which came back with a very high result. My mom and dad always knew I was smart, but after the test there was sort of this expectation of me. I had these skills, so I should become a doctor, lawyer or something traditional.
After moving to the countryside, I struggled to fit in with my peers. Everyone else in the area had grown up together and there was a lot of bullying. I was not a super attractive kid, I had a pretty big nose and acne, but I wasn't even aware of that until people started picking on me for it at school. I really went through it. At one time I just wanted to go to school for a single day without being bullied or crying.
At that stage, dreams of being a doctor were pretty much gone for me. I felt very disconnected and eventually I fell in with a bad crowd and stopped going to school. I had just wanted to find a group of friends who weren't going to make fun of me and because it was cooler to skip class and make fun of the teachers, that's what I did. My mom would drop me to school but my friends and I would just run away to the local town and smoke marijuana.
Eventually, my mom and dad enrolled me in a specialist high school in Utah; it was the kind of place parents send their kids when they don't know what else to do with them. Students did therapy everyday. We analyzed ourselves constantly, which I don't really think is necessary at such a young age. On one hand, I'm very grateful I was taken away from the situation I was in, because many of my former friends have struggled with drug addiction, but I also missed having that high school experience. It felt as though I was thrown into adulthood and had to learn my strengths and weaknesses really quickly.
At the end of high school, I took an IQ test and applied to Mensa with a score of 136, because I thought it would help me get into college. At the time, some of my friends were just like: "Oh, we didn't really know you were so smart." I think people often have a brief conversation with me and form an opinion very quickly. It's not as if I talk about math and science all the time, so people usually don't think I'm that intelligent.
I enrolled at the University of Massachusetts in Boston when I was 17. Because I had done so much therapy during high school, I naturally gravitated towards studying psychology at college, but soon afterwards I dropped out and spent some time traveling. A few years later, I saw how much money some of my friends were making working in finance and decided to go back to study economics.
I really did enjoy college, there was never a point where I did not like learning and it was great to have friends in an educational setting, but even before the COVID-19 pandemic, when all my courses switched to online, I knew I didn't want to pursue a traditional career long-term.
To me, college is a tool to get where you want in your career. Of course, for many jobs you need a degree. You can't just be a nurse or doctor without the right training. I didn't dislike college, my teachers or classes, but towards the end of my degree, I just didn't want to do it anymore.
I only had a few semesters left when one of my friends told me she was making $150,000 a month through OnlyFans. I didn't even ask her about the job, I just called my advisor and said: "I'm done." I did not think my decision through, often if I get a feeling about something, I act spontaneously.
After dropping out of college aged 21, I briefly pursued a career in both finance and real estate while making extra money through online modeling. I found working in a professional environment was exciting, because it was an advantage for people to think you're stupid sometimes. When I was competing with men, they often wouldn't even think of me as a threat, which came in handy. I never felt the need to prove my intelligence.
At the beginning of my modeling career, I was making around $2,000 dollars per month while living in New York. I was really clueless about strategy, but I thought it was awesome. My content is relatively tame, if someone subscribes to my account, the only thing they're going to see for free is my breasts. Would I want my parents to see my OnlyFans? No, but I'm not embarrassed or anything like that. I'm never going to run for political office, so the fact these images are online doesn't really matter to me.
As I continued to model, I began learning about strategy from other users on the app, who made much more money than I did. I began promoting myself through other people's pages and now I make around $100,000 a month while spending around $30,000 on marketing. I believe producing content on OnlyFans is really hard work. In fact, I think if I had stayed in school and got a normal job it would have been a lot less work, but it's nice to have a community of other models who I speak to every day.
How does she feel about getting all this positive attention for her looks now, after being bullied about them when she was younger?
I think the perception of adult models is that they are unintelligent, that they just take pictures without any skill and they're so lucky to make so much money by doing next to nothing, but the reality is there is so much more that goes into it. If there's a company making half a million dollars per month, they'll likely have their own marketing team and various people who specialize in certain things, but most influencers don't have that. Online models usually have to figure it out through trial and error, by talking to each other.
I think many people idolize the "American dream" of getting a traditional job, working for years at a low wage and waiting until you reach fifty to be paid well, but that's not what I want.
I believe that social media influencers and reality stars all have different sets of skills. For example, keeping fans engaged; not everyone is going to stay subscribed if you just post a million naked pictures, it's more than that.
Candice Kloss is a New York-based model and social media influencer. You can follow her on Instagram at @candicekloss.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
As told to Monica Greep.
