People ask me what it was like to write Rose Colored Glasses. My honest answer: it was brutal. It was beautiful. And I would do it again every single time.
Writing a Memoir is a Form of Archaeology
You’re excavating your own life. Every chapter required me to go back to places I had, in many cases, worked very hard not to visit. But staying away from those memories wasn’t healing — it was avoidance dressed up as coping.
Lesson 1: The Story You Tell Yourself Becomes Your Reality
“Rose colored glasses” is a metaphor for the way we color our experience to make it more tolerable, more romantic, more survivable. I was wearing them for years. Writing the book was the process of taking them off and looking at my life clearly — sometimes uncomfortably clearly.
Lesson 2: Vulnerability Is a Competitive Advantage
Every section of the book that I almost cut because it was “too much” is the section people tell me resonated most. The thing you’re most afraid to say is usually the most universally true thing in the room.
Lesson 3: Beauty Is Not Frivolous
People sometimes dismiss the beauty industry as shallow or surface-level. Writing this book helped me articulate something I’ve always believed: the way a woman looks in the mirror affects how she moves through the world. That’s not vanity. That’s power. The salon chair is a place of profound transformation.
What I Hope Readers Find
Themselves. Their story in my story. The courage to take off whatever rose-colored glasses they’ve been wearing — and the permission to still love themselves fully when they do.
Order Rose Colored Glasses here.
— Janelle Alexis
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