My Story, Unfiltered: How I Got Here | Unfiltered Life with Liz Ep. 1

Welcome to the very first episode of Unfiltered Life with Liz — a podcast built on real, honest conversations about life, trauma, and what it actually takes to keep going.

In this raw and deeply personal introduction, Liz shares the story behind who she is and why she started this show. She opens up about growing up in a violent home, surviving childhood abuse, spending time in foster care with her younger sister, and the moment she and her sister made the brave decision to fight for a different life. She talks honestly about her lowest points — including struggling with suicidal thoughts at just 11 years old — and the people who kept her going.

Transcript

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Welcome to the first episode of Unfiltered Life with Liz. And I want to do this first episode really about me and who I am in my background. Because why in the world should you watch a podcast with some tall blonde chick who looks like a lot of other tall blonde chicks? How am I different? What why would you want to listen to this or participate in something that is necessarily unfiltered? When with my fake extensions and my blonde hair, I probably look kind of filtered. Well, it's because my life has never been easy. Um, it's been a struggle from the start. So this first episode is gonna be about that. And it's gonna be about um overcoming that, surviving that. And I do want to be completely honest, there are parts of my story that I don't know if I'll ever share. I don't know if I'll ever actually say them out loud. Um, because they need to stay in the little compartment in their brain that they're in. So, how did I come to be in this world? So, my parents, they found each other when they were in high school. And I take after my dad and my dad's side of the family, and he was always somebody who had a little bit of a wild streak, and I inherited that. So, with that wild streak, he found my mom, and my mom did not have a very good background. Um, from my understanding, from talking with family and from what little bit she shared, her parents didn't really want to be parents, and so she bounced around. My dad, on the other hand, very much had a loving family and parents who cared and wanted the best for him. And so they met each other and dropped out of high school at 17, got their GEDs. Um, they had me at 19 and my sister at 21. Um, their marriage was not a good one. Um my best guess from some of the stories my dad told me, they they separated probably six times. Um, they had a very violent marriage. There was my first memory was actually when they were fighting so bad, and I got up. I used to sleep under the bed a lot, um, just because of the fighting. And through being in foster care and things like that, life was a little scary. So for me, sleeping under things was always kind of my thing. So, but I snuck out because it got really loud that night. And my dad saw me, he went to put me back in bed, and whatever was going on with them escalated to the point that my dad, my mom got a shotgun and was pointing it at me and my dad, and she was pulling the trigger. Um, she just didn't know how to work the shotgun, is the only reason that me and my dad are still here today. Um, and I remember him putting me back down on the bed and taking the gun from her and hitting her with it, and they went back out into the hallway, and I don't know what happened next. That's my one of my first memories um as being a child. They finally did get divorced. Um, there was some cheating and things like that. So as soon as the divorce was final, my mom immediately married my stepdad. My stepdad was also physically abusive. Um, and we wound up moving to Virginia. He was in the Navy. Um, and while we were in Virginia, he beat my little sister so bad that he left hand print bruises all up and down her back. Um, and he happened to do it right before we were due to go visit my dad in the summer. So I remember the big argument between my mom and my stepdad, and it wasn't because he had hit her that bad. It was because we were about to go to my dad's and my dad would see the bruises. So, of course, he did the first time he went to give us a bath, and we went to the sheriff's office, and I remember the sheriff actually holding up his hand to the bruises and taking pictures. Well, again, because my parents are my parents, the lots of fighting, lots of finger pointing, all the things, and the judge didn't know what to do. So he took us out of the home and put us in foster care. So I was in foster care for about six months with my little sister. Thankfully, we were placed with some really great people. They didn't have a ton of money, but I remember being very happy at that house. And as somebody who was in kind of an unhappy house before that, it was a blessing. Um so things went down the way they went down, and we got sent back. Um, so nothing really changed. The only thing that changed with my stepdad is that instead of hitting us to the point where he left bruises, he would open hand hit us in the face. Um, that wasn't it. There was also times where he would um call us all kinds of different names. There was lots of verbal abuse. Um, it was a very, very strict house. And if we didn't have things done in a certain time frame as far as our chores or what was expected of us, then we were getting hit. Um, nobody really knew outside of the house what was going on because we weren't gonna tell anybody. It was already scary enough as it was on the inside of the house. It was for a long time I didn't even realize that it wasn't normal because when that's how you grow up, you don't know that things are different in other houses. It wasn't until I was older, probably around eight, nine, and spending the night with friends and family, that I started realizing that not every house was like our house. Not every everybody was scared to speak or make noise or not get chores done at exactly the right time every day. And so that was when I started asking questions. And I asked questions of my dad and I asked questions of my grandmother, because my grandmother is who is always a very bright light. Um, she was who we spent summers with. Um, I miss her a lot. Um, so I started asking questions and stories that my mom had told me about my dad, and the stories my dad had told me about my mom, I was so confused. Well, my dad went and pulled the court records and he let me read through it. And that's when I realized that a lot of what my mom had told me was all bullshit. It was all a lie. And at eight years old, I'm figuring that out. And granted, my sister's still six at the time, so she she doesn't really understand or comprehend what's going on. So I go back to live with. Um, we don't have a choice. We're we go back to my mom's um after the summer was over with, and I told her one to live with my dad. And her response to that was to put me into therapy, and because nobody in their right mind would want to go and live with our father. And so had to go through that whole ordeal where they pretty much told me I was crazy and all this and that. Um, and things just kept on, kept on the same way they were going, and there wasn't really anything we could do about it. And there was a point in my life where I was probably 11, and I I was ready to just be done. I was ready to be off this earth, off this planet, because I was like, this is not how like I know this is not how the world is supposed to work. And so I contemplated suicide. I contemplated running away, but I knew my sister being my sister, she was very sensitive, she was very kind-hearted. There was no way she was gonna make it unless I kept standing in front of her in those situations, and so I didn't leave. Um, in the state of South Carolina, which is where my dad lived, um, you can decide at 12 years old where you want to live and who you want to live with. So when my the summer my sister turned 12, she went to my dad and she said, I don't want to go back. So my dad pulled me in and he was like, if we do this, it's going to get ugly. And I looked at my sister and I said, Are you are you prepared for it? Can you handle it? Because she never saw the same ugly that I saw. And she said, I don't want to go back, I can't do it anymore. So at 13 and 12, my dad actually mortgaged his truck and paid for a lawyer, and we had to sit with paralegals and tell everything. Tell as much as we could remember about everything we could remember. And we had to sue my mom basically for custody. That was um a scary and a liberating thing all at the same time. Because seeing the horror on people's faces as we're telling these stories and talking about, oh, well, my mom said um I gained too much weight this summer with my dad. So she put me in a bikini and she took pictures of us to show us how fat we were, and then wouldn't allow me to wear blue jeans because she said I was too fat to wear them. Like telling stories like that and seeing the horror on people's faces was validating, but also to a 13-year-old whose hormones are going crazy just pissed me off. And I became so angry and so kind of just introverted and didn't know what to do with all of those emotions. And my mom made our life a living hell. Um, that was a point where you could actually record conversations and things like that. And she called us every name under the sun, said I was gonna wind up barefoot and pregnant, living in a single wide trailer and never amount to anything. The whole shebang. What it came down to, we never had to go to court because right beforehand, she said, as long as I don't have to pay child support, I don't care. Do what you want. So my dad agreed not to ask her for child support. She kept every single thing of ours that was at her house, including our shot records, birth certificate, the whole nine yarns. Kept it all, wouldn't let us have anything. Later told me that she sold it all. Um, and so we had to get all of our shots again to be able to go to school. Luckily, the school worked with us and didn't have to have our birth certificate right away because back then it took 12 weeks to get a birth certificate from a Navy base, which is where I was born at. And so we were able to start high school here. Um, high school for me, it was working, just basically trying to survive and and figure out life, right? And things were easier, but they weren't because my dad and my stepmom also didn't have the best relationship. And my stepmom and us didn't have the best relationship because for her, here she was thinking, you know, she was the fun on holiday only during the summertime parent. And now she's a parent of two teenage girls who are angry at the world and just got dropped in her lap. And to be honest, it probably wasn't the fairest thing for her, but at the same time, she she wasn't the greatest either. And there were situations that are not my story to tell, they're other people's story to tell about some things that went down. Um, and so high school, you know, they tell us, told us back then, I graduated in 2001. Um, you had to go to a four-year school. If you were gonna be anything, you were gonna not have to be struggling your whole life and living paycheck to paycheck like my parents, who are mechanic and worked in a factory, then you went to college. So I got accepted into Clemson and I went off to college not having a clue. Number one, how to study, how to live on my own in that kind of a situation. And so that was a whole figure it out situation in and of itself. So I get to Clemson and I fit in, but I don't fit in, right? I'm a blue-collar girl who's been through some shit, and I'm out here at Clemson with all these people who grew up with money and who have parents bought them brand new cars to go to Clemson with and all of that. But I met Bates. And Bates to this day is still one of my best friends. And when I say we can talk about anything and everything, and she's got my back and I got hers, 100% I can say that. Also, when I was at Clemson, I met a man who was my first love. And he didn't go, he did not go to Clemson. Um, he was from where I'm from in South Carolina, Anderson, South Carolina. And he was the first man I was head over heels all the way in love with. The problem with what happened with him is that during that time things were rough in Anderson and he wound up getting on drugs. And I didn't know or fully comprehend or understand drugs or or what that was. And it was a struggle because I wasn't gonna be around it. I didn't go through what I went through to be pulled back into some kind of life that revolved around drugs, selling drugs, any of it. I was going to Clemson to get out, to be better, to do better. And when you but you when you love somebody, you keep getting sucked into it because they'll get clean and they'll do better, and you get sucked back in because you love them and you want to be supportive, and then they fall back on drugs. And we did that cycle for years, even after I graduated from Clemson. The end for me was um he was coming down off of a really long high and he had called, he was crying. Um, I'd went over to his house and he was locked in a room with a gun. And he was saying how he didn't want to live on this earth anymore, he couldn't do it anymore. He was crying and apologizing and all of that. And I had to talk him down at 19 years old through his door. Um I say I was a little bit older, I was probably 21. Talk him down through the door and to keep him from killing himself. And I couldn't do it anymore after that. Um, I wound up changing my number, the whole shebang, and just had to pray and hope for him for the best. At that same time, though, I knew I was dealing with issues with things that had happened in my childhood, and I didn't want to be like my parents. I wanted to have a healthy relationship. I wanted to learn what that looked like. And I knew through the relationships that I was having, and some of them revolved around domestic violence. Some like I just wasn't picking good men. I wasn't surrounding myself with people that were going in the direction I wanted to go to in life. And so I started reading self-help books. I started going to conventions, I started trying to figure things out. Um, and it's a journey that I have been on since I was 21, 22 years old. I'm 42 now. I'm still learning. I'm still trying to understand what it means to feel your feelings, to talk about the past, to talk about the trauma, to talk about all of those things in life. Um for me, I've had some really wonderful relationships with friends, with my girlfriends. I've not always had the best relationship when it came to a romantic partner. And I never fully comprehended or understood why or where that was coming from. And it wasn't until I moved here to Georgia. So one of my really good friends when I was growing up is my ex-husband. And we always just kind of got along. We were always just the best of friends. He he's got family that I absolutely adore to this day. And I was going through a breakup and dealing with some things with my father that were not pretty, and I needed to get out of South Carolina. Um, and so my ex-husband was actually going through a divorce at the time, and he was like, well, move to Augusta with me. Because I was actually looking to move to Arizona because I had got on Google and I had researched women in their 30s, um, professional women in 30s, where can they make the most amount of money? Um, where is the best standard of life for them? And I actually said Arizona. So that's where I was planning to go was to Arizona. He said, Arizona's expensive. I know I live there. You want to consider coming to live in Augusta with me. So he he flew in because he was acting, he was in the army, he was active duty, and we came to Augusta and we went looking around. And when I first got here and we went driving around, I was like, no, sir, this is no better than where I'm living at in Anderson. And where GPS had taken us was not the best parts of town. Um, the second day when we were out navigating and everything, we found the beautiful size of Augusta. And I was like, okay, I can do this. Um, so we found an apartment. And like I said, he had just gotten divorced and he was dating and doing his thing. So we found an apartment. I lived on one side, he lived on the other side, but we split the bills so that we could afford it. And over time we fell in love. Is it the kind of love that I would say um romantic movies are all about where we're all head over heels? No, but it it was a love of fondness for each other. And I think that's part of the reason why our marriage didn't last, um, is because it didn't have the passion and the head over heels that we probably needed to have. But not long after we started dating, we found out he was in kidney failure. Um, and I was terrified. But the only way I know how to love is to love with all of who I am. And if somebody needs something, I'm gonna be there in any way, shape, or form. I'm gonna figure out how to make it happen so that life is easier for them because I love them. And to me, that's that's what I knew for my grandmother of love to be. And so I wound up being able to donate a kidney to him. We were surprisingly a really good match. And he was able to recover from that very, very quickly. They didn't let him stay in the military, but he was able to recover from that very, very quickly. Um, he's besides having to take medicine twice a day, was able to live a completely full life. Um, and as time grew on, um, we didn't our marriage did not last. Um, and we did get divorced. And part of that was my fault because I didn't know how to communicate my feelings very well. Um, and when you don't know how to communicate your feelings really well, you get resentful. And he didn't know necessarily how to understand my growth as a person because I was going from being his wife while he was active duty and following him around, to then our agreement was I could build my career after he retired out. So as I'm growing as a person and a professional, he didn't know what to do with that because he didn't know how to be Liz's husband when I had always been his wife. And that was a really hard transition for him. And I think when you don't have that level of love that a husband and wife are supposed to have for each other, things just wind up the way they wound up. So the divorce was extremely hard for me. Um it was hard in a way that it was scary because it was one of the first times that I felt in my life that I didn't have anybody that if I failed and fell straight on my butt, that would have my back. So leaving a marriage and not really having a family or anybody you can depend on or count on, your business, that was when I first got into real estate. So I was only in it maybe a year and a half. So I was making money, but not really making a lot of money. And so going out with a brand new business through a divorce, it I it was tough. It it was it was really tough to mentally and emotionally navigate through that. Um, but part of how I navigated through that was really great friends. Um part of how I navigated through that was loving on my community. Because I believe when you give back to your community and when you give to those around, they they naturally it comes back. It's a karma thing. It really is. And it's just how life works. Um and so this is just kind of how this is going to work with unfiltered life with Liz. It's a little bit of my background and a little bit of why I want to have real and authentic conversations around life. Because when I've started talking about my story, so many of you guys have come up and told me you've been through similar experiences. But you're either too scared to talk about it because of the stigma, you're too scared to talk about it because you're worried about what other people are going to think. Well, for me, when I see where people have gone through stuff like this, all I see is somebody with strength to keep persevering forward, who's willing to keep learning and to keep growing as an individual. And even if you fall flat on your face again, you get right back up. So join me on this um this little journey of what this podcast is going to be. Um, so like, subscribe, all the things, and I look forward to seeing y'all the next episode.