YouTube Diary: Woman Reunites With Boyfriend After Break-Up Videos
Sept. 7, 2010— -- For most of her adult life, Kelly Summers survived tragedy by hiding it.
Accustomed to performance, the 53-year-old singer from Nottinghamshire, England, said she would put on her make-up, give the world her strongest face and take cover under her stage persona, "Sunny Daye."
But when her boyfriend broke up with her this summer, uncorking a stream of untended emotion, she decided it was time to do the opposite.
Instead of burying her pain, she broadcasted it online, revealing every raw moment in a series of videos on YouTube.
Six weeks later, the string of video clips hasn't just attracted more than 30,000 views or given Summers a new outlook on life, it's done what she never expected: It's helped her reunite with the love of her life.
"I'd always hidden me. I got to the point where I was just screaming. I was just so sick of not being heard, not being myself," she said. "Everything toppled down on top of me. I just realized that I wasn't going to survive unless I did something drastic and radical."
When her romance blossomed with Keith Tallis, a 55-year-old British singer, in February, Summers said it brought her happiness she hadn't experienced in decades.
In 2000, she had an accident that injured her right arm so severely she said she could no longer write properly. In 2005, her 23-year-old son Blake died unexpectedly after a seizure. Summers said he was the fourth of her five children to die.
"[Tallis] set me free from grieving every day for my children and for my past life that was ruined with my accident," she said. "He came along and gave me something that made my heart whole again. And nobody had been able to do that. ... It's something in him that put that back into me."
The pair happily dated long distance for a couple of months but, when Summers paid Tallis a surprise visit in April, she learned the devastating truth: He was living with a long-term partner and her young child.
Summers confronted Tallis and ended the relationship but, in July, he traveled to see her and said he was a single man.
