Miss West Tennessee for America 2025

I was born and raised in Central Texas. For the most part, up until I was about 10 years old, my life was pretty happy. I lived with both my parents and my younger brother, played sports, competed in beauty pageants (I wanted to be Miss Texas and Miss America), was involved in Girl Scouts and had plenty of friends. When I was 10 years old, I began being molested by an older cousin and as a result of that, I developed Trichotillomania, a hair-pulling disorder. The disorder started with my eyelashes, then went to my eyebrows, before impacting my very at the time thick hair. I began pulling around 10, but wasn't diagnosed until I was around 13. There was a lot of trauma as a result of my hairpulling, but I learned to live with it...or rather, hide it. 

After graduating high school, I lost my first love to suicide and during my first semester of college, I was drugged, raped and stalked after a night out with friends. As if the events up to this point weren't traumatic enough, I ended up in a string of unhealthy and toxic relationships, culminating with a long term relationship with a narcissist and surviving narcissistic abuse. 

I had always wondered why God had done these things to me. I prayed for him to take away my Trichotillomania. I prayed for these relationships to work out. If I'm honest, I was angry and frustrated at God and wondering what I had done so wrong that He was punishing me. It wasn't until I moved to Tennessee in August of last year, that I realized that my battle hasn't always been in the physical. Yes, I had experienced physical hurts and pain, but the battle wasn't with those who had hurt me or even with myself, it was with the enemy and it had been since I was a child. I had done a lot of self-work, especially being a therapist, to move beyond my trauma and better myself. However, some patterns just kept sticking and I didn't understand why I couldn't change them. I had broken through some spiritual warfare when I ended the relationship in which I experienced narcissistic abuse. I was having a hard time leaving this relationship, which culminated with a month long migraine that included absence seizures before I rededicated my life to Christ one night in my bathtub after watching an Elevation Church service on YouTube and going no contact immediately after that.

It wasn't until I attended an Instead of Shame small group at  my church that I finally understood what had happened, why I still had some of these responses and why there seemed to be a negative pattern of relationships in my life. The problem was that I had a heart bondage and the truth was, until I was free from that heart bondage, all the work in the world in the physical wasn't going to change what was happening in the spiritual. That's when I joined the Freedom Class and everything began to change. By committing my life (past, present and future) to the Lord and learning how to put on the full armor of God, I gained my full freedom. 

My goal in sharing my story, is that God has used my pain for a purpose. Through the pain of Trichotillomania, I published the first children's book ever written on the subject in 2018 and that book earned me the The InspireU Network's "Children's Author of 2023" award. I have used what I learned about myself through my broken relationships, one of them being that I was codependent, to help my clients (both male and female) overcome codependency. I help clients get out of abusive relationships, began to set boundaries and learn to love themselves. I am able to do this in a way that someone who hasn't lived through these events never can. And now, I want to share with others, the hope that they too can overcome their pain and that God can and will give their pain purpose. What the enemy meant for evil, God will turn it for the good. We are all God's children and He loves each and every one of us. He will work all things for our good and give our pain a purpose. 

  “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28