Perfectly Imperfect: Elizabeth’s Journey From Buried Trauma to Rebuilding Herself

What makes you a Beautiful Disaster?
I have been torn down, but I keep getting up. Now I know I can do it—it just takes me a while, especially now.

Why do you identify with the Beautiful Disaster brand?
Almost all of the collections speak to me and what I’ve been going through these last few years. Especially “Perfectly Imperfect,” because I’ve always felt Perfectly Imperfect and Beautifully Broken.

My Beautiful Disaster Story

I’ve always known I had a hard life and an unstable upbringing. But for most of my life, there were big blank spaces in my memory.

In 2022, I got COVID, and one of the strangest side effects was how it scrambled my brain. My day-to-day memory started disappearing—and at the same time, cracks formed in the walls I’d built around my deepest secrets. Memories I had buried for decades began to surface.

I remembered the sexual abuse my father inflicted on me for many, many years.
I remembered the neglect and absence of parental care that left my sister to raise me.

Our parents had split up. Mom wasn’t around, and Dad was an alcoholic and drug addict. We caught our mother with a woman when we were very young and didn’t understand what we saw. When we tried to talk about it, we were called liars. No one ever believed me.

I was alone for years. My sister was still a kid herself—she wanted to be with her friends and didn’t know what was happening to me. When she started to suspect something around the time I was 10 or 11, she tried hard to protect me without really knowing why.

There was also a lot of abuse aimed at her. One night my father was drunk and started to hit my sister. I tried to stop him, and he flung me onto our dresser. The twisted part was that he stopped immediately because he was upset about hurting me—but he had no feelings at all about what he was doing to her. She, too, was sexually abused by him at a very young age and buried her memories. He stopped with her and made me his new target for a long time.

By my teens, I was smoking cigarettes, drinking, and experimenting with drugs. In my early twenties, I realized I was turning into him and didn’t want that, so I stopped.

Therapy over the last few years for severe anxiety, depression, and PTSD has opened the door to these buried memories. It made it even harder to learn, 45 years later, that not only had this happened to both my sister and me, but that our mother knew—and never did anything to stop it. She made excuses. She even admitted that she was upset because she “knew why he wasn’t having sex with her.” That comment killed what little relationship I had with her.

Remembering the trauma my parents put me through—plus remembering a rape and two attempted rapes—truly broke me down. But slowly, I’m building myself back up.

When all of this came up, it was the same time I found Beautiful Disaster. Your brand spoke to me on so many levels. It helped me start to feel good about myself again, forgive myself, and begin finding the new me I’m supposed to be.

What happened for you to turn it around?

I have a great husband and two wonderful boys. I’m doing the work to be better and get back to being functional. Therapy, plus the empowering messages from Beautiful Disaster, have truly been helping me.

I proudly wear everything I’ve gotten from Beautiful Disaster. I absolutely love what you stand for and how uplifting you are.

3 Things I’ve Done to Move Closer to Happiness

1. Accepting that I did nothing wrong and did not ask for what was done to me.

2. Even though I’ve lost many of the good memories with my husband and kids, I’m making new ones and trying to be more present.

3. I’m finding the new me—embracing myself instead of hiding, people-pleasing, or worrying about what others think.

What is your favorite Beautiful Disaster collection, past or present, and why?
Perfectly Imperfect is my #1. It speaks to me and makes me feel that it’s okay to be me—that I’m enough. But truly, I love everything.