Why I Wrote Rose Colored Glasses: The Story Behind the Story
By Janelle Alexis | Author, Beauty Entrepreneur & Speaker
Writing a memoir is an act of radical vulnerability. You are opening your life — the mess of it, the beauty of it, the parts you are not proud of and the parts that break your own heart — and placing it in the hands of strangers. For a long time, I was not sure I was ready to do that. Here is what changed my mind.
I Was Tired of Pretending
There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from looking successful on the outside while quietly carrying pain on the inside. I was a salon owner. I had a following. I had built something real. And I was also a woman who had walked through some of the darkest valleys of her life without anyone knowing. The pretending was exhausting. Rose Colored Glasses was my way of telling the truth.
Someone Needed to Hear It
I know she exists — the woman who is smiling at the camera and sobbing in the car. The woman who gives her clients her best energy while saving her worst moments for herself. The woman who has been so strong for so long that she has forgotten she is also allowed to need someone. I wrote this book for her. I needed her to know she was not alone in her story.
Healing Required Telling
I have learned that healing and secrecy cannot coexist. As long as I was hiding the difficult chapters of my story, those chapters still had power over me. The act of naming my pain — putting it into words, arranging it into chapters, sending it out into the world — was one of the most profound acts of healing I have ever experienced. I am not the same person who started writing this book. I am more whole.
I Wanted to Change What Beauty Means
The beauty industry sells surfaces. I wanted to go deeper. Beauty, to me, is not what is applied to the outside — it is what is cultivated from within. Resilience is beautiful. Honesty is beautiful. The refusal to let your hardest moments define you as anything less than worthy is beautiful. Rose Colored Glasses is my attempt to redefine beauty from the inside out.
What I Hope You Take Away
I hope you close this book feeling seen. I hope you feel permission to stop performing your life and start living it. I hope some chapter cracks something open in you that needed cracking. And I hope you walk away knowing that your story — messy, incomplete, still in progress — is worth telling.
If you haven’t read Rose Colored Glasses yet, you can find it here. And if it has already changed something in you, I would love to hear about it.
— Janelle Alexis
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