She's in Los Angeles, devouring a plate of takeout Taquitos. The native Norwegian, who regularly walks the runway for Alexander Wang and Chanel, skipped her one-hour lunch break from her EMT course to ride her motorcycle to a Louis Vuitton casting. Modeling may be the last thing on her mind today as she talks about motorcycle trips and grand adventures. Still, just like back when she and her fiancé had to postpone the rest of their motorcycle tour through Guatemala so she could exclusively walk for Chloé in the Fall of 2015, the fashion world has a way of beckoning.

The slender eccentric with rosy cheeks lives a "On the Road" style life, a dream for 9-to-5 desk-bound individuals. Hessen is wherever she wants to be, whether it's riding her motorcycle to Canada to escape a hurricane or joining a stranger on a road trip to Florida after her second Fashion Week. "I met this guy," says Hessen about the man who became her fiancé, "and it was in the middle of Fashion Week, and he said, 'Do you want to ride with me on my motorcycle to Florida?' It was February and March, we were both freezing, and we felt uncomfortable. We stayed in motels or with people we met, but it was really fun." A few years later, they embarked on a journey from London to Africa after finding a cheap dirt bike on Craigslist. "We thought we could ride all the way to Morocco," she says. "In the end, we rode to Nigeria before the motorcycle exploded. They ended up stranded in Mauritania, where locals took them in, camped with a family, briefly traveled to Senegal before Hessen and her fiancé fell ill with malaria and staph infections. Due to lacking visas, they were deported and eventually returned to the USA.

They quickly recovered and moved to the West Coast, living in makeshift accommodations ranging from a rented airplane hangar to a Craigslist-purchased ambulance. "We had no kitchen," says Hessen. "And we had no money, so we ate only canned tuna and rice. In the end, I weighed about 45 kilos." Hessen took courses at a community college and an EMT course at UCLA. "When we were sick [in Africa], I felt somewhat helpless and also like an idiot. I feel that basic knowledge becomes much more important. When we met people, they asked, 'What do you guys do?' We work in the fashion industry. We work in the fashion industry," says Hessen, recalling a conversation with the matriarch of the Mauritanian family they had met along the way: "[The man we stayed with] was kind to his wife, but she still had no control over her own life. She said to me, 'The only blessing I have in life is that I have no daughters. My sons can at least be something; they can take control of their destiny, but as a woman here, you have nothing, you don't make a single decision for yourself.'" One could say that Hessens's newfound interest in medicine is rooted in her determination to be the mistress of her own destiny. "If I'm riding with my fiancé on a motorcycle through the jungle, and he gets injured, and I don't know how to save him, that would be a tragedy," says the model, "because that is preventable."

The same electrifying obsession with independence is evident in her Instagram account @delikathessen, a sarcastic, comedic collection of social observations, from a woman using a selfie stick on a windowsill that says "Keep Off" to images of dolls mocking the modeling industry, and even her failures at freight train hopping in Las Vegas. The one thing you won't find on the social media platform? A casting, test, or runway photo. "I believe that, as women in general, we simply say that as long as you look pretty and post many sexy pictures on Instagram, the biggest thing in feminism is making sure you can show your nipples on the internet. Okay, that's great, but do you also know what's happening to women who don't get an education or who are circumcised at the age of two? I don't give a damn about their nipples; put your energy into something else. If that's your biggest problem, not feeling liberated as a woman, then you're overprivileged, and you have too much time, in my opinion." Additionally, Hessen's Instagram is something personal, she says: "That's the only part [of my life] that's public where I can truly be myself, and it would be a shame to waste it by posting model pictures." We have a feeling she'll soon have many more opportunities to be herself.