Dignity Dressed
When I started tinycutedresses.com, I built the first iteration of it from my friend’s couch, where I was sleeping while visiting the city that I had now made my new home, and where I’d found my greatest love to date a week after relocating officially.
A couple of months before that, I had undergone the greatest shock of my life to date, leaving me for months severe symptoms from entire-body convulsions to dissociation, panic attacks, depression, you get the idea. I had remembered once repressed memories of sexual trauma that I’d experienced in my own home growing up. While my body had been showing signs of PTSD for years before through an eating disorder, panic attacks, insomnia, or anxiety, it all made sense and I finally had the direction and clarity to heal with the truth to carry me through. Re-establishing a relationship with myself, remembering my never-lost dignity, and learning to source my sense of security from within vs a job, a program, a lease, a partner, or anything outside of me. This learning continues to be the pillar that guides as the light along my healing path.
Through one of my deepest dark moments of despair, I had the idea to start tinycutedresses.com. From when I was a child, one of the very first things I’d ever drawn were designs of dresses. I kept journals and journals of my cute scrabbly design sketches! And while I am currently partnering with an amazing supplier to offer you the styles on Darling Dressed—a name I choose to show every woman who encounters our shop that she is worthy of being treated like a true darling. I curate every single piece of clothing and ensure that all styles are fun, flirty (from you for you, first), and fit within Darling Dressed’ brand mission of helping women dress and embody their cute, always, and in any season and occasion. Perhaps one day, I’d be designing these styles myself!
Feeling cute and feeling good had supported me along my mental health recovery journey. And I hope that whatever you find that fits your vibe, that you dress yourself in your own inherent dignity first. I was initially creating this project to help sustain me financially when I wasn’t generating an income through the shock trauma response, but I pray it becomes much more, and that it would enable me to pay it forward. You see, security is a sensitive topic for survivors, the heroes, of childhood sexual trauma. Providing myself with the inner-security has been my goal post and hope to inspire others along the process. You can, too! We will rise together and that is the sweetest revenge we must take for future generations of men and women to come: to heal and move past the pain into purpose.
So let’s begin again.
My hope is for this website and other initiatives to follow through awakening during the trauma healing process, including shineyourhighness on Tiktok, is for it to serve as a means of personal expansion and reclamation, and to empower myself to empower other women, and continue to heal every being whose world my words touch.
Darling Dressed will give 10% of proceeds to supporting other women in reclaiming their dignity from within. May my process be a testament of what’s possible.