Please,

okay? Like, how are you taking care of yourself when you are in bed alone? How are you holding yourself? And for me, it looks like journaling sometimes.

It looks like literally just taking a deep breath.

It looks like getting at least seven hours of sleep when I can.

It looks like taking my magnesium glycinate.

It looks like keeping my therapy sessions and my psychiatry sessions.

It looks like getting refills of my... mental health medication, and staying on top of that.

only way to be present enough to

I loved that book so much.

Thank you.

That's my favorite.

I will say out of all of my book babies, that is my favorite.

I talk about my career.

I talk about the relationship I had with my mother.

And it was a really tender expression of how I got to this place in my life.

Yeah.

... that doesn't align with what others are expecting of me, sometimes familial relationships, because they've also seen that same thing we're talking about, this toxic-

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm ...

the expectations- Mm-hmm ... that you will give until you can give no more, and then a little bit more on top of that.

Mm.

And I'm, I'm curious about your advice to the readers and to our listeners about how you navigate that dynamic when there is that misalignment.

When do you say, "Okay, this simply doesn't work," or, "This is worth pursuing and figuring out or adjusting"? Mm-hmm.

Mm.

But the clarity and the communication and theThe truth is sometimes missing, and that has been such a, a big piece for me as I've gotten older, so I love that.

I wrote about that in, um, in the book and how being a people pleaser doesn't serve anybody.

[chuckles] And I also was talking about how I realized I was just lying to people.

When I'm saying yes when I wanna say no, that's lying.

When I'm showing up and pretending like I wanna be there, that's a form of manipulation.

I'm not a manipulator and I'm not a liar, and so I had to be like, "Oh girl, but you're doing both of those things." [chuckles] Like, you are doing both of those things to keep someone in your good graces, to please someone while you abandon yourself.

Like, there is a fine line between compromising and self-abandonment.

Um, so then we just say, "Okay, well, it's fine," um, and self-silence.

Tell people where they can find you, where they can find your book, all of those things.

So you can find me on Instagram.

My business page is @Alex_Elle.

You can find me on Substack at alexelle.substack.com.

This new book is out wherever books are sold, um, on May 19th.

What else? My other books, How We Heal, After the Rain, so on and so forth, are also available wherever books are sold.

And, um, do I have anything else coming up? Oh, I'm going on tour.

Oh, cool

Mm.

Wanting to win people over, wanting to be, you know, a soft place to land, wanting to be super flexible, and, you know, I'm an only child, so my friendships really do become kinship.

They do become sisterhood.

And Nikki was always, like, wanting to be close to me but then would push me away.

It was a very kind of strange dynamic.

I don't think it had anything to do with me, actually.

Sometimes I think it was more so she was used to being in relationships with other women where she felt like she had to protect herself.

Yeah.

Right.

Like, you should just be grateful, right? You should just take what you're given and be grateful, and that's not how life works.

That's not how my life works, and over the past couple of years, I've had a lot of changes happen, and I have had to find the glimmers of joy-To touch gratitude while I have been grieving.

Grieving the different versions of myself, grieving relationships, um, falling apart, grieving the thought I-- the life I thought I wanted to have, the woman I thought I would be.

And understanding that I'm still allowed to touch joy and to be grateful and to, like, have gratitude wrap its [laughs] itself around me while I'm in these moments of stickiness and maybe pain and hurt and confusion.

And, um, for me personally, I think that gratitude can only be experienced if we're willing to keep the door open to it.

You know, like, there's only so much and so many activities and so much social bandwidth that I have, or just emotional and energetic bandwidth, right? Um, but I think being intentional about that choice means that you're not lying to anyone either.

Yeah.