#147 – Elita Summers: Overcoming Hardships#147 – Elita Summers: Overcoming Hardships
Recovery Survey
Writer and entrepreneur Elita Summers shares her experience of miscarriage, family alcoholism, job loss and mental health struggles, and how counselling, faith and creativity helped her reshape her life. The conversation touches on stigma in Black communities, reclaiming identity from work, and finding the courage to build something of her own.
30:23•1 Mar 2023
From Loss to Light: How Elita Summers Rebuilt Her Life After Hardship
Episode Overview
- Hardships such as miscarriage, job loss and family alcoholism pushed Elita to confront buried pain instead of just pushing through.
- She realised how much of her self-worth was tied to her job title and worked to separate her identity from her career.
- Counselling, faith, journalling and calming music helped her process grief, childhood abuse and low self-esteem.
- Elita challenges stigma around mental health in Black communities, stressing the importance of caring for the mind like any other part of the body.
- Starting her writing and food businesses gave her more freedom, healthier relationships with work, and space to be her authentic self.
“"There were a lot of dark days that I had where, honestly, I was just ready to throw in the towel."”
How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety? This episode of Recovery Survey follows writer and entrepreneur Elita Summers as she talks honestly about grief, identity, mental health, and building a life that finally feels like her own. Elita shares how a seemingly conventional tech career slowly drained her, even as she did "the standard expected thing" of uni, internships, and stable jobs.
A pregnancy in 2020 briefly brought joy but was followed by miscarriage, a painful wake-up call to her mother's alcoholism, and then a redundancy. She describes being "paralysed with the weight of everything" and realising how much of her identity was tied to her job title. Instead of skipping over the hard parts, Elita talks about crying over the kitchen sink between job applications and learning that pushing through isn't the same as healing.
She explains how faith, prayer, journalling and instrumental music helped calm the chaos, and how working with a counsellor opened the door to address childhood abuse, low self-esteem and people-pleasing.
She also calls out the stigma around mental health support in Black communities, stressing that "you need to take care of your brain just like you take care of your heart." From there, Elita describes slowly stepping into entrepreneurship with her content-writing business, Plume, Pen & Pencil, and a food venture, enjoying the freedom to choose clients and actually feel appreciated.
She jokes that before all these hardships, she "had less personality than a Bath and Body Works wallflower", and credits those "best worst" moments for pushing her towards authenticity. This episode speaks to anyone wrestling with family addiction, grief, or feeling trapped in a job, and offers a gentle reminder: you don’t have to stay stuck. What might change for you if you stopped pretending everything is fine and asked for real help?
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