#God bless this mess free

She started telling friends she'd only do the show if he was the Bachelor. ' She also started watching The Bachelorette, and the one guy she thought she herself would like to date was Colton Underwood. She shot a quick video on her phone, sent it in, and set about catching up on the most recent season, 'starring a guy named Arie. Matt Baron/Shutterstock Looking for Love?Ībout a month after the Miss USA pageant, Hannah got a call from a producer on The Bachelor: She'd been anonymously nominated and would she like to audition? (A friend-of-a-friend videographer she'd worked with during the pageant turned out to be her secret nominator.) When she was 20, a pageant director sent her a picture of another woman with the message, 'You need to look like this by orientation week.' 'It was never healthy,' she writes of going up and down and back again on the scale. Hannah recalls 'drowning in insecurity and a self-hatred of my own body' and going on her first diet at 15, following a 'pageant expert's' strict regimen. She lost 16 pounds in two weeks and was second-runner-up in her first-ever pageant with a swimsuit competition. ' You're so pretty, but if you could just lose ten pounds, you would really see a difference,' was a frequent refrain. Her parents didn't believe in counseling, so the healing process didn't really begin until her twenties, Hannah shares, when she started to work through the past trauma with a therapist.Īs early as 4 or 5 years old, Hannah noticed 'that my legs were bigger than the legs of the girls beside me' in dance class, and throughout her teens 'that comparison in the mirror never went away.' She obsessed over how her thighs touched, unlike other girls' legs-or even the legs of her American Girl doll.įast-forward to when she entered the competitive world of beauty pageantry, and the suggestions that she lose weight began. She still has trouble sleeping to this day, and wonders whether a diagnosis of narcolepsy a few years ago (she's almost incapable of deep, restorative sleep) was in part brought on by fear. 'I'd lost my innocence,' Hannah writes, as well as her sense of safety, even at home, and the happy times that her family might have shared if this tragedy had never occurred. Her dad's side of the family grew increasingly distant after that and even stopped getting together for holidays, no one wanting to fully deal with the empty chairs. ( Wilson Billy Robitaille, who pleaded not guilty, was convicted of multiple counts of capital murder and sentenced to death.) He ended up stabbing her and the children to death. She left him alone in the kitchen and, when she returned, caught him rifling through her purse.

#God bless this mess free

Per Hannah's account, an ex-convict who was free on a work release program after serving time for a nonviolent offense-a man whom Lee and her husband Stuart had previously let live in the travel trailer in their yard and hired to do odd jobs-knocked on the door one day when Stu was at work and Lee let him in, since he was hardly a stranger. The story was big local news, but she tried to block out what happened for years until she finally went online to learn the whole story. Though her mom told her the next day that her departed family members were 'angels in heaven,' she wouldn't know for a few days that someone had killed them. She recalls sending that something was wrong one May 2001 night when her father had to dash off and miss her dance recital. When she was 6, Hannah Brown's Aunt LeeLee and two young cousins were murdered at their home in Hamilton, Ala.