In-depth Story: Cindel Hollancid – Going for the Crown

Every time she saw a modelling ad in the paper or on a billboard, her heart skipped a beat. The excitement, however, was always short-lived. After years of disappointment, an opportunity with her name written all over it fell into her lap one Saturday evening. This was more than just a pageant…it was an invitation to begin peeling away layers of insecurities that had left her broken for years.

As a child growing up in St. Lucia, Cindel Hollancid always wanted to be a model. At  the age of 13, she moved to New York and discovered a world of opportunity. She saw ad after ad for aspiring models to sign up with modelling agencies, but didn’t actively begin pursuing modelling until she had completed high school.

It all seemed promising, until Hollancid discovered that every opportunity she sought turned out to be a money-making scheme.

The agencies would take her money and then tell her she didn’t have “the look.”

The constant criticism, in addition to insecurities she already had from her days in high school, took a toll on her emotionally, and Hollancid, who had been sent by her mother to New York to live with family friends, began believing the negative voices around her and in her head.

“Some people would tell me that I was too short, or too fat,” Hollancid told The Weight She Carries. “So, naturally, I began to feel really ugly about myself.”

After years of being swindled out of money by different modelling agencies that weren’t real, she gave up her dream of becoming a model. She joked with friends that someday she would have a daughter whom she would put into beauty pageants so she could live vicariously through her.

While Hollancid accepted that modelling and beauty pageants were not part of her destiny, she was determined that, one day, people would know her name.

Jack of All Trades...

“Anyone who sees me, sees confidence. The way I carry myself, the way I put myself together…people looked at me but didn’t know the hurt I was going through.” – Cindel Hollancid

After high school, Hollancid took a 10-year break from school and struggled to find her place in the world. She went from job to job and did every kind of work imaginable. She moved often and would live with a friend until she had overstayed her welcome, then she would move in with another friend.

“I house-hopped a lot, and I wasn’t respected because of some of the choices I made,” Hollancid said. “I even got married at one point and that lasted a year.”

When the marriage dissolved, Hollancid began dating someone else who she had history with, but his parents didn’t approve of her. They told their son that she was “unstable”, and because she wasn’t part of the “elite” at church, they fought to keep the two apart, Hollancid said.

They succeeded.

Hollancid was devastated and contemplated suicide when the relationship ended. To make matters worse, her ex moved on and married someone who attended the same church. The following year, the couple was expecting. Unable to bear the sight of them every week, in addition to every other aspect of her life spiraling downward, Hollancid left New York.

“It was so hard for me to see them together,” she said. “That was the young lady that his family wanted him to marry – the same family who said I was unstable and didn’t have any wifely skills, according to them.”

Meanwhile, Hollancid, who was now 27, settled into a job as a unit secretary at a hospital where she met a Nigerian woman who worked at the same hospital as a podiatrist. The two were the same age.

“She had completed college, gone to medical school and was now doing her residency as a podiatrist,” Hollancid said. “We became very good friends and I felt embarrassed that we were the same age and yet she was so accomplished.”

Hollancid hadn’t planned to go back to school. She was making good money and figured she would retire as a secretary, but her friend continued to encourage her to go to college.

“For years people told me I wasn’t good enough. Coming to college, people said, ‘Cindel, you want to be what? A nurse? I don’t think you can do it. Nursing is hard.’ And when you’ve heard that for so long, you believe it.”

Still, Hollancid was determined to prove them wrong and began taking one class at a time.

“Some days I would feel great, but on others I would think, ‘Why am I so ugly? Why am I not pretty and light-skinned like my friend? Why don’t I have this person or that person pursuing me?'” – Cindel Hollancid

During college, Hollancid had her heart set on eventually marrying a pastor but couldn’t understand why the men in the seminary overlooked her and pursued other women instead.

“Why was I never picked, why was I never chosen? Why was I the one they never got married to? Why was I the one who got used and put aside? I always wondered why,” she said.

As she cried out and questioned God, she felt Him tell her that the ones who had hurt her didn’t deserve her.

Hollancid decided to take a closer look at herself and embarked on a journey to self-discovery.

Overcoming deep-seeded insecurities...

What Hollancid began to realize when she examined the negative thoughts in her head was that two major events that had occurred during her tender years had an enormous stronghold over her life as an adult: the death of her father and being sent away from her family in St. Lucia at 13.

“I grew up in a single-parent household without a father figure. I looked to men to fill that void, and men can read into a woman’s vulnerability. So, unknowingly, I communicated all of my insecurities to them," Hollancid said.

The dysfunctional relationships had lead to even more insecurities, and the inability, at the time, to set boundaries left her feeling used.

It was then that Hollancid decided that she wouldn’t let anyone define her. She continued to focus on God and how to love herself.

“What I’ve learned is that your actions begin with you. Me constantly telling myself that I wasn’t good enough translated to me not feeling good enough for many years. Now I know that I AM good enough.” – Cindel Hollancid

“I now know my value is in God.  I now know who I am – I am an incredible work of art. This is who God created me to be. When others said I was not pretty enough, God said, ‘Cindel, you are fearfully and wonderfully made.’” – Cindel Hollancid

And Then It Happened…

Many years later, Hollancid was on her computer trying to send a link to a gospel concert to a friend, when she stumbled upon an advertisement for a gospel pageant.

The ad was for the 2nd Annual Ms. National & Independent Gospel Music Association (N.I.G.M.A.) Christian Pageant set to be held in Greenville, South Carolina on June 20^th.

“I felt sheer excitement,” she said. “It was a Saturday night, January 6, 2018. I started going through the requirements and I was the right age. I met all the requirements listed. I couldn’t believe it! That had never happened to me before.”

The following day, Hollancid called her best friend to tell him the good news, but before she could share the news with him, he told her he felt strongly that God was telling him that they should no longer be friends...Next Page

“He said we should no longer be in communication, no longer interact with each other…we should just sever ties, completely,” she said. “I was heartbroken.”

“With my best friend leaving, I’m realizing that I clung to men –  whether in a friendship element or a romantic relationship – I was dependent on them and that was a dysfunction. So, with me having no one now, God is showing me that men are not who I should depend on.” – Cindel Hollancid

Hollancid and her best friend had been close for a year and shared a spiritual connection so strong she could not describe it.

“My walk with God would not be as close it is today if it weren’t for this man,” she said. “We clicked so perfectly on a spiritual level.”

Hollancid spent the rest of the afternoon in tears. That evening, as she lay on her bed, she felt God leading her to read the story of Joseph and his brothers.

“I read that story every day for the rest of that week and I felt that God was telling me: ‘I am going to elevate you. Through this pageant, I will propel you,’” she said.

As the pageant approaches, Hollancid feels nervous about her speech – an insecurity that has weighed her down for years.

When she moved to New York, the kids in her neighbourhood had teased her relentlessly about her accent whenever she was called upon to read in class. And because she sucked her tongue as a child, her front teeth protruded.

While she knows her mother, who passed away last year, meant well when she sent Hollancid away to protect her from what she perceived to be bad company, being separated from her siblings and friends with just two-days’ notice affected Hollancid immensely.

“When I left St. Lucia, I was a happy kid. But in New York, every time I would open my mouth to speak, kids would make fun of me,” Hollancid said. “It just really shut me down.”

With the love and support of her family, her closest friend Leslie Nicholas, committed supporter Donald Sibblies, and two mentors who have been paramount to her journey to self-love – Earnest Flowers and Patrice Bettison-Clark – Hollancid now knows that she is fearfully and wonderfully made, and believes she has everything it takes to win the crown.

“I don’t even know why they are doing this pageant,” she said. “But what I do know is this: For once in her life, Cindel was actually selected for something – something that I never thought, at my age, would happen.”

“I’m a very resilient person. If you tell me I can’t do something, I tell you, ‘Watch me, I will.’ And for everyone who told me I couldn’t be a nurse, guess what? I’m now completing my doctorate in nursing.” – Cindel Hollancid

Hollancid is also making plans to become a certified life coach in the near future.