To start, how did you get involved with pageants?

The first pageant I ever did was the Forestry pageant when I was maybe 12 or 13. My sister and I were doing a photoshoot, and the person who was doing our hair and makeup said they didn’t have enough people and wanted to have us as warm bodies to fill the stage. I wasn’t sure about it, and my sister really hated that idea because she's never been a spotlight person. But it was the best thing I've ever done. I had so much fun for once in my life. I felt like people could see me and that was something unusual for a quiet girl who grew up in a town where everybody knows my family through my fearless dad who has a giant personality. Pageants gave me that spotlight where I felt seen and I always wanted to do them after that. I kept begging my mom and she finally gave in but told me, “If you're going to do pageants, they've got to have a purpose. You've got to find something that is going to be beneficial in growing you as a person, not just something that is superficial.” Ironically enough, the high school that I was in at the time turned their pageant into what we call a preliminary. I competed and won Miss Freshman. That was my first involvement, and I’ve been doing it ever since in some capacity. Some years I've gone and done hair and makeup for friends or helped out on local boards for other preliminaries. Most years I've competed.  I had asked my sister, “Do you think this is something I should do? I feel like I'm really good at it. Do you think I could be Miss South Carolina?” And she was like, “I don’t think you could be Miss South Carolina Teen or Miss South Carolina right now, but I think you could someday.” That really stuck with me, so the next year I signed up for a prelim and I think it was about two weeks before that prelim was set to happen when she went missing. She had told me that if I made it to state that year to compete for South Carolina teen, she would do my hair and makeup and come watch the show because she was really excited about it. She'd always done my hair and makeup, so that was a really big deal. My sister being taken completely turned my life around, but what kept me from becoming a product of my circumstance or just another statistic was that the South Carolina organization really stepped up for me. The chief of police for Myrtle Beach, Sandra Rhodes, sat in my living room and said, “You need to do something that gets you back to a sense of normalcy.” Whenever something bad goes wrong, the best thing you can do is cross something off a list because it feels like you've accomplished something and taken back control over a situation where you don't have any control at all. So, two weeks after Heather went missing, I went to compete at Miss Summerville Teen. I do not remember any of that; I blocked everything out. I went and I won teen, and the directors that run that pageant are wonderful people. They really helped me through that first year. When I went to Miss South Carolina teen to compete, the board directors were so invested in each candidate that at the meetup meeting that year, they actually brought in the public speaker specifically for me - Dawn Smith Jordan, a former Miss South Carolina who has a missing sister who was murdered back in 1986. They wanted to make sure that I knew that I was being supported and thought of; that meant the world to me. Had it not been for that, I don't think that I would have gotten mentally through the extreme trauma in my life, especially with the ongoing harassment, stalking, court dates, and trials that followed and still continue to happen to this day. So, I competed and I competed and then nothing happened. I started taking time off to get back to myself and find myself outside of pageants. I went to college, and I realized while I was away from home that I hadn't dealt with this trauma. I'd been pushing it away and using big experiences to talk about it on the pageant stage, and in the moment, I thought that was helpful but standing on a college campus, all alone in the world, you start to realize things about yourself. I ended up dropping out of my first college experience because I just couldn't mentally or physically cope with the long-term effects of that trauma while facing new challenges as a person. Usually when someone drops out of school, it’s very difficult to get more funding or get scholarships to go back. The Miss America Organization and Miss South Carolina scholarship organization were able to help me go back to school, and now I've got an extensive education and resume. When I dropped out, they made it safe for me to admit it was because I was dealing with myself and putting my mental and physical health first. Over the years, I've competed and gotten thousands of dollars in scholarships that have enabled me to be able to further my education when I really wouldn’t have had that opportunity otherwise; and that's why I keep competing.

You bring up a great juxtaposition between the aesthetics and the deeper intent. I haven’t participated, but I've observed how pageants create community within all of you as well as the leadership role that you play in your community, too.

Miss America is the largest scholarship provider for women in America. They just had their 100th anniversary. I believe it was only the first few years that it was running as a swimsuit competition for a cash prize, then they started providing scholarships for women, because during that time there wasn't help for women to get education. For almost 100 years, Miss America and every state underneath them has been focused on providing a safe and positive environment for women where they can take something they're passionate about and turn it into education or a career while helping them to find the funding to do that. It is not just a unique story to me. If you walk into a room full of Miss America candidates, every single one of them is going to have a story. One of my very best friends had breast cancer and a double mastectomy at 24 years old. That's her platform. She's now one of the keynote speakers for the Susan G. Komen Foundation. My other best friend is the current Miss South Carolina and is traveling the state telling her story of sexual assault and how the system failed her. Even if you take away the scholarships, you’re still getting a sisterhood full of women with stories who are well -educated, open-minded, and willing to listen. You're getting practice walking into a room and interviewing on the spot, learning to speak for and defend your morals or beliefs. It was a really big deal that I was able to learn how to speak about what had transpired in my life and to speak about it confidently.

Definitely. You have this grace about you and it's something that some people could say is innate to you, but I think it’s something you’ve built.

Something that not a lot of people know about me is I have Tourette’s Syndrome and I have Asperger's. Due to behavioral therapy techniques to cope with how my body works, it has always been very difficult for me to speak in a way where I didn't feel like a robot. It's been really difficult for me to walk into a room and to connect with people in the way that I wanted to connect and to come across as genuine, to make eye contact and really have that deep connection with a stranger. Being a title holder, I go out in public and I'm making appearances and I'm talking to strangers on the street. When I am pushing for my platform (your social impact initiative), I am speaking to people of all different backgrounds, cultures, ethnicities, and speaking abilities, and I'm able to adapt to those situations now. That's almost unheard of for someone who grew up with the kind of social deficits that I did. I know that a lot of women have come into the organization and learned those skills and been able to apply them. That's why you'll find that a lot of people who compete in the Miss America system are teachers, lawyers, and social activists. They're all public figures who are involved in some kind of speaking platform, and it's because of the skills that we learned.

You are the owner, founder, and advocate of The H.E.L.P.P. Project. You have over 30 certifications and counting. You contact families of the missing  within 24 to 48 hours because you know that time is of the essence when it comes to that trauma. You are also a South Carolina Guardian Ad Litem.

When I tell people about being a guardian, the best way is to use layman’s terms. Imagine you have a child who wants to do gymnastics and Mom and Dad are both coaches, and they teach differently. All that's going to do is cause stress on the child because they don't know whose rules to follow. So, a guardian ad litem is kind of like a referee in the situation and they say, “Let me talk to the child and I will see them practice the way Mom wants it, and then I will see them practice the way Dad wants it.” Once I have been able to observe them in both settings, talk to the child and see what they want, I'm able to decide what's best for them. That's pretty much what a guardian does, but in the courtroom.

I can’t speak from experience, but I would imagine that being in a courtroom compounds trauma.

When I was in the courtroom the first time, I was still very young and I definitely felt silenced. There were many times when I didn't know what to say or if I was even allowed to, but even if I had the opportunity, it wouldn't have come out correctly because nobody ever asked me what I was feeling or what I wanted. It's really important whenever someone goes through a trauma of any capacity to ask them those questions, because grasping reality is really, really difficult. Unless someone asks you questions and you verbally can say, “This is how I feel. This is how I felt in the moment, and this is what I want,” then you might never come to those conclusions. Being a victim advocate and being a guardian is really hard. I mostly work in family cases, cases where DSS has been called and I’m making assessments about whether a child can go home. That's a really difficult call to make, but it's something that I take a lot of pride in because I know that I was a child who lived through and still lives through a giant crisis and a giant trauma and needed a good environment in order to survive. I don't know that a small child should stay in a toxic environment where it's going to stunt their education, stunt their mental capacities. I have to make the best call for them, and it's easier for me to do that because I've been through a situation where, although circumstances were different, I needed to make the best judgment call for myself at that age.

What I've learned from you is that you know you will make yourself uncomfortable to help make someone else comfortable.

Always. I’ve kind of come to terms with the fact that I’ll probably always be uncomfortable for the rest of my life. So, if you’re going to be uncomfortable anyways, you might as well do something good with it. 

Another thing that I've learned about you is how the phrase ‘toxic positivity’ can be harmful, in regards to respectful terminology and not making assumptions as an outsider. 

Toxic positivity is a hard topic, a lot of people get personally offended when you bring it up because they’re accidentally guilty of it. It’s not something that I’m angry about; it’s just an educational point. If you go into an advanced calculus class and you’ve only ever taken beginner mathematics, no one is going to get upset with you because you don’t know the answers to the questions, this is because you haven’t ever been taught how to answer the questions. It’s not that I’m upset with people for the things that they say; I’m just trying to educate them because words can be very hurtful. If you're talking to someone who is in a high-stress situation, there is not a lot that you can say to help them, but there is a lot you can say to make things worse. It's been years since my sister was abducted and I still to this day remember the very first question that someone asked me when I left my house and went into public. It was a friend of mine who asked, “So, are you going to open up her Christmas presents or send them back?” I realize that she was young, I was young, and to them, a missing person was something that happened on TV and not in real life. They were so desensitized to it that they couldn’t even understand what they had asked me, but years later, that’s something that sticks with me. Because again, there’s not a lot you can say to make things better but things like that make it so much worse. When I talk about toxic positivity, I’m talking about when you say, “Well my sister is missing and I’m in a lot of pain and I just can’t socialize with you today,” and someone says, “Oh, I totally understand.” It’s hurtful because they don’t understand. When you say to someone, “I understand,” it makes them even more agitated and dismissed because you can't possibly understand, and stating that you do minimize their experiences. What I usually tell people to use for terminology in that moment, is, “I don't understand what you're going through, but I'm here if you want to talk later.” Or, “I can't possibly understand, but I am sad for you.” Something that really got to me personally is being told, “Your sister would be so proud of you.” This is the best example of toxic positivity because it is clearly a positive statement but is toxic to the trauma survivor.  It takes all the meaning away from her being proud of me, because most often the people who are saying that didn't know her at all, so how could they possibly know if she'd be proud of me? It causes crippling self-doubt. Something I struggle with everyday anyway is, “I wonder if she would be proud of me. Would she approve of this?” And some stranger who never met her making assumptions and saying, “She'd be so proud of you. She loves you so much,” is hurtful. What I mean by toxic positivity is people attempting to bring a positive light to a situation or say the right thing, and really making it worse for the person who is grieving or hurting. If you want to talk to someone who is going through a high-stress situation, the best thing you can do is ask questions. “Do you want to talk right now? What can I do for you in this moment?” The worst thing you can do is make assumptions and statements, like “Everything will be better. It'll pass. You'll be fine. I'm sure she's proud of you.” Those things are assumptions that you're turning into facts and they can be really harmful long-term. When you make those assumptions and statements, they can be wrong, but if you’re asking questions, you’re giving a voice to the person who is grieving or hurting or stressed and allowing them to make the facts and make the statements. 

For example, people diagnosed with cancer have a completely different experience. If we create a space for them to share what they feel comfortable with, we can paint more pictures that way.

All the time in my private interview for Miss South Carolina, or when I'm talking to state officials or people in any work capacity in crisis skills, they ask, “How would your platform be effective to every person?” It comes down to the fact that trauma care, crisis care, and trauma education are the root of everything. You say that someone in a cancer situation is different from someone in a missing person situation, but at the root they're not. They're going through a traumatic situation that has destabilized their life. It has uprooted everything that they know to be true and it has caused them to question reality. Dealing with those symptoms, it doesn't matter what your crisis is; you need to have the skills, equipment, and resources to understand what's going on around you and what to do next. When I talk about our community garden for my sister and the safe spaces that we provide in our community as a family, it's important that we teach the community how to remove their prescription, as I say. Every person has a prescription lens just for them and it's based on their experiences in life, their environment, their parents, their social settings, their schools. In order for us to create a safe space and really value the people around us and their experiences, we have to take off our glasses with our custom prescription so we can put on somebody else's and see the world through their eyes before we can help them. It's giving value to each trauma and story. No matter what you've been through, you can't help somebody unless you remove your own stigmas, your own biases, your own opinions. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about how I should be grieving, how I should move on, things I should say, things I shouldn't say… and it's not anybody's business except for mine. And it took a lot of learning for the people around me to understand me when I said that. Because they had to learn to take off their own prescription from their life experiences so that they can value my opinion on my story. Giving people access to  trauma informed care and education, allows our communities to have the resources to remove that lens.

It’s like how someone will encourage you to get out of the house, but as an introvert, that might not help. If we go off someone else’s prescription lens and advice, it can almost set you five steps back.

That's kind of what I meant about how I thought I had dealt with a lot of my trauma until it caught up to me and I ended up having to leave school. I based it on the fact that I followed the instructions of people around me, who thought they knew best. Had we had better community education for trauma, grief, and crisis response, we could have bypassed a lot of that pain. Because I would’ve have coping mechanisms and resources that I could pull out to use to help myself to heal, to help myself to not feel obligated to other people's healing. My platform and The H.E.L.P.P. Project are about providing better trauma informed education in our first responders and in our communities so that we can have these safe spaces where people are not judging or imposing beliefs or opinions; they’re just listening so that people can be heard for the first time. A lot of times you have someone who went through a situation like mine and they’re seventeen years old and they've got nowhere to turn because even when they do speak, no one listens. I talk first and foremost about providing better trauma informed care and education to our first responders because I remember people coming into my home and we were just another number on the page. It was so destabilizing and so heartbreaking to me because like I said, I grew up in this town where everyone knew my dad. My dad knew all of these officers who were walking through our house and it was jarring to see these people who were no longer people to me. I didn't know how to deal with that. I didn't know how to deal with being sat there, you know… cheek swabs, everything in my home being dusted and photographed, and papers being taken. It turned my home into this empty shell of a house; we never recovered from that. I didn't have the skills at the time to cope with that, so the only thing I could do was distance myself from it, compartmentalize it. That's so damaging; it causes so much more trauma that we often don't know how to recover from because we don't know that we got it in the first place. I wish somebody had sat down and just humanized us again. There's a difference between asking about what happened and hounding someone for information because you're never going to get it. You hear a lot about rape victims who have no recollection of what happened to them, and that's because when we go through something traumatic, our hippocampus - the thinking center of the brain - shuts off as part of our fight or flight survival mode to protect us. But when it shuts off, the thing that still is working is our feelings memory, our sensory memories. Oftentimes, you'll ask a survivor of rape what happened and they don't know, but if you ask them, “How did you feel? Do you remember smelling anything?” they’ll remember those things. They’ll remember what the grass smelled like or the smell of rain in the air, because those feelings stick with you forever. Had someone sat down with us with that trauma informed approach, it would have bypassed so much trauma for me and my family, but those responders did not have the capability to speak with us on the level that we needed because they lacked trauma training in that area. The other thing that I advocate for is trauma informed  childhood education. We learn the alphabet when we’re 5 years old; it’s a fun, easy song. 30 years later, you're having a conversation using every single one of those letters in the alphabet, but you're not thinking about every letter; it comes naturally, just like breathing. Imagine if you used the same processes for subconscious programming. Teaching children trauma response techniques at five years old in a fun and light-hearted way, they're going to grow up learning how to subconsciously Implement their skills. It's going to bypass a lot of trauma, stress, and mental anguish for a lot of children. We talk about children in a classroom who are acting out, and everyone gets mad because we think the teacher should ask what's going on at home instead of just looking at the behavior and saying, “You're acting out. I'm going to punish you.” That’s a really good theory, but if you are teaching four classes a day with 20 kids, then you don't usually have the resources to do that. If you taught children at 5 years old subconscious skills to cope with stress and anxiety, you wouldn't have kids acting out as much in class because they'd be able to deal with the stress and the problem going on at home that’s causing the poor behavior, and if not they’d have the verbiage to ask for help. You start to undermine all of these poor behavior choices that adults have because it all started in childhood when they couldn't deal with what was going on in their lives. That's the premise of The H.E.L.P.P. Project, of trauma-informed care and bridging the victim gap. 

A child knowing that there are tools in their toolbox that they can use when they're feeling triggered would make such a big difference compared to a verbal escalation with the teacher.

Whenever you're stressed, you’re reacting rather than responding. Something that I do and I use a lot with young children is the countdown method: You say, “Hey, can I get your attention? You want to play a game with me? Do you want to count and maybe take some breaths?”

And you say:

·      Can you tell me five things that you can see around you? Before they can finish naming the last one, you go to the next.

·      Can you tell me four things that you can feel right now?

·      Then, three things that you can hear

·      Two things that you can smell

·      Then you have them take a really big deep breath and tell you one thing they can taste.

You're counting down 5, 4, 3, 2 1, but you're using your senses working to turn back on the thinking center of your brain. It's taking you out of that stress center and putting you back into your rational center so you can focus, pay attention, and make decisions. If you learned that at five years old, you can do it in two seconds when you're 20 years old standing outside the door of the job interview, starting to have a panic attack. By the time you get to that last one, you've calmed yourself down, your heart rate is lowered, your brain isn't spinning, you're able to take a deep breath and go into whatever situation you were stressed out about. It’s rewiring your brain to self-soothe and to adapt to situations without the help of others, so that you can be independent and you can survive in a world that is honestly unsurvivable at this point, right? The other method is the three’s method which is the same kind of concept but it's a 3-3-3:

·      Say three things you can see

·      Say three sounds you can hear

·      Move three body parts, like moving your fingers, rolling your ankles, moving your arms around. You’re getting back control of your physical body when you do that.

That’s a coping skill that anybody can use.

Like you said, anywhere, anytime.

It’s so important because as I was saying, I got so distanced from my trauma to try to deal with it, I thought that was okay and everyone told me, “You just have to compartmentalize it. You learn to check your baggage at the door.” That is so toxic, and it causes so many problems physically and mentally down the road. I compartmentalized for so long that the stress became a normal feeling for me. I actually had an underlying autoimmune disease, and the long-term exposure to stress without any kind of regulation took a toll on my body and I now have an adrenal issue. My adrenal gland, your stress gland, does not work anymore. I don't produce cortisol or stress hormone like I should. I have practically no immune system because of that. One of the best things that I learned from a very close friends, who used to be a doctor, is that the best doctors you’ll ever have are the ones who, instead of saying what's wrong with you, they'll ask you what happened to you, because nine out of ten times when something is wrong with your body - not just a cold or a flu - but when you've got a blood pressure issue, a gut biome issue, or chronic illness, It's a result of something you've been through that has caused an imbalance in your body. The best doctors you will ever have know that. They'll figure out the root cause and help you to deal with those symptoms based on where it came from. Had I just gone to a doctor who looked at me and said, “Well, you have an adrenal gland issue; we’re going to treat it with this, this, and this,” I would still be suffering. But instead he knew where it came from because he asked what happened to me and was invested in my story. He was able to pinpoint the reason that it became an adrenal issue and now we can regulate my stress levels instead of just treating the adrenal issue. Trauma is not just in the moment. Compartmentalizing trauma is not a treatment, because the body keeps the score; and it will always come back to bite you if you don't deal with it.

Absolutely. I think the word forgive can be kind of strong, but to me, forgiveness might fall under the term grace. How do you show yourself grace?

I would say that I don’t show myself grace, but I have taught myself forgiveness. Forgiveness is a really big deal for me. It has gotten me a lot of crap thrown my way because the last time I was ever on TV in a courtroom was the day that my sister's kidnapper, the husband at least, was being found guilty. I was able to speak as a part of the victim statement. Normally for the victim statement you speak to the judge, and I faced the judge for the majority of my speech, but I did turn to him at one point sitting at the table, and I told him that I forgave him. And I do; I forgave the both of them for taking away my sister and for taking away my safety. Every single day, I choose to forgive them for taking away my security and the life that I had planned, because they continue to take that away every single day by not telling me what happened to my sister, where she is, or if she can come home. I have to make an active choice to forgive them, but it took me a long time to realize that forgiving them, even though I did it for myself, was not enough. Every single day I have to not only choose to forgive them, but I have to choose to forgive my sister for not being here. And I have to forgive myself for being mad about it, when it's out of her control. Those are things that are really hard for people to face a lot of times. I show grace to myself, in your words, because I choose every day to forgive instead of letting myself harbor hate in my heart, because that doesn't help anybody. If I hate and I stand around and resent, I'm just holding myself back and I'm allowing the people who've already taken so much from me to continue to take even more in a world where things keep get taken and taken. We can't allow anybody else to take anything from us. I made a decision a long time ago to show myself grace and forgiveness by choosing that life. I actively everyday have to choose to forgive them because forgiveness is not just a one-time thing. People think you forgive and then it's done, but that's not true. It’s not linear; it’s up and down and backwards and forwards. And sometimes you put in seven months of solid work and it all goes down the toilet, and you have to rebuild that again. Everybody's journey looks totally different. I hate using the word journey because it sounds so cliché, but it all is totally different. I have to make an active choice every single day, and some days I can't make that choice. Some days I can't get out of bed. But some days I wake up and I am inspired and ready to take on the world. It looks different every single day and it will continue to look different for the rest of my life.

What does a day in your life look like?

It's entirely different every single day of my life. I try not to live on a very tight schedule because I had to teach myself that I cannot be in control 100% of the time. I still get really cute planners that are color coded because it makes me feel organized, but I don’t plan things out by hour, by minute. I try to fit things in while also giving myself a decent amount of time every day to have to myself because I know that that's very important for me. Part of my downfall in the beginning of trying to deal with my sister being missing was the fact that I didn't have any control and I couldn't do anything; I was helpless. It really made me spiral, feeling that way. So much so that that two-week period before I competed in that first pageant, I lost so much weight that when I put my evening gown on in the dressing room the night before the pageant, it literally fell straight down to my ankles. Now, if I allow myself to place too much importance or control on any situation, it's very detrimental to me. I use my planner and I keep track of events and what's coming up, but I don't rely on anyone or anything. I allow myself to just go with the flow. I also eat pretty intuitively. I have simple routines. When I get up, I always do my skincare first thing in the morning and I always do my skincare at night before bed because those are two things that keep me giving myself some “me time.” It makes me feel good and taken care of. But everything in between, I try not to schedule at all. I keep it a toss-up.

That’s kind of the way that I've kind of shifted my life over the last two years without being able to articulate it in the way that you did. And you sharing that just gave me a sense of permission that I can do that, too.

A lot of people struggle with that after having a traumatic event, even just a loss of a job. It shakes you up and makes you feel out of control. Being able to learn to live with things out of control allows you a smoother and happier life. Because if I don't look at my day the way that I do, I would just be stressed all the time. That's a lot of what's wrong with our society anymore. We go to work, come home, go to bed and then we go to work, come home, go to bed, and it's so routine and so busy and nobody ever slows down. And so, without being in any kind of trauma, we keep ourselves in a fight-or-flight mentality, which is extremely damaging to the nervous system. That's what causes people to spiral out of control when something small goes wrong, because you’re so used to your routine and every minute of your day being perfectly articulated and controlled. When they lose control, they can't possibly come back from it. I watched my dad do the same thing because the last thing that any father wants is to have a daughter that they can't help. He lost all control and he was entirely helpless and he spiraled out of control because he had so much control for so much of his life previously.  It took him years to get back from that. So, when you watch it enough in other people, you really learn to have an appreciation for not scheduling control into your day.  

One thing I want to say is that I noticed how many headlines were written that called you “Heather’s sister” before calling you Morgan. I'm an only child, and I’ve always seen people as individuals before siblings. Your life with your sister has obviously impacted you in so many ways, but you are an individual, too. And I think that that's really important to note.  

You’re touching on two things right now that I’ve spoken on a few times and that is, one, I appreciate you saying that you’re an only  child and so you don't really have any first-hand experience. To me an only child will never understand the connection between siblings. Losing a sibling can be  similar to losing a parent relationship-wise, but I wouldn't presume to know that feeling either. When they were first doing investigations, they would come to me with a lot of questions because the sibling will know another sibling better than any parent or friend ever will. It's a very strange relationship, very close relationship. But something I really struggled with for a while was being heard and being seen. My mother’s never been a good speaker and my dad just wasn't emotionally available enough to do the interviews or public speaking, so I was 17 years old standing in front of all the media outlets doing most of the interviews for our family. It was very interesting because I was very distanced mentally from it so I was able to speak very well, but it kept me up at night having tried to articulate those things, as if it wasn't someone that I was so close to. It was also hurtful because I was no longer Morgan; I was just Heather’s sister. I gave reference to it in an interview I just recently did, because I was trying to remind people that I’m not just Heather’s sister; I’m Morgan Elvis and here are my accomplishments that don’t have anything to do with that. Because it felt like every single thing that I did for a long time was, “Heather’s sister has a new certification in victim advocacy,” or, “Heather’s sister has a new job working with missing people.” It was like I couldn't be appreciated for my hard work because everyone just assumed that everything I did was because of her, which it is, but… make your assumptions in private. Because I’m not just Heather’s sister. One of my most recent interviews opens up that way with clips saying Heather’s sister and it really gave me some insight.  Heather was a little bit older than me. Our entire childhood, she was very quiet and I was very well spoken so I would speak for both of us. Everyone always said, “Oh, you’re Morgan’s sister,” and she despised that because she was older. And for the first time ever, I understood, because the tables were turned. Don't get me wrong, I love being Heather’s sister, and it made me really happy that people would see me and say that. But I still don't want you to look at me and only see her - there's a difference between thinking about something and making me so small that I'm just Heather’s sister.

You are, and it's so much more than a crown and a dress. You really are changing lives and making an impact and while you do have your sister, it's you. It's very much you.

My reasoning behind things are often my family and my sister and my own healing journey, but at the end of the day, your reasoning behind something doesn't validate or invalidate the work that you're doing. I do a minimum of 1,500 community service hours every year. That's work that I'm on the ground doing and I'm choosing to do it for free because it's important to me, not just because I have the opportunity because I have a crown on my head. Because with or without a crown or a title, with or without a sister who’s not here, I’d still be doing those things. I am doing this because I’m choosing to do this, not because I have to. It’s more than that.

Follow Morgan Rhiana Elvis on Instagram here and learn more about what she does here.