Chapter 48
Elsie’s Guide to Happily Ever After
Transcribed by Olivia O’Brien
There are a lot of things you need to work through, and the person best equipped to help you with that is a good therapist. Though your friends will always be here to talk about anything you want or need to talk about, a therapist will be able to help you in ways that your friends can’t.
Your people-pleasing tendencies might have you wanting to tell the therapist whatever it is you think they want to hear. It’s important that you don’t do that. Be honest, and be open to hearing what they have to say.
You deserve to be the best version of you that you can possibly be. Therapy can help get you there.
*Grace wants to add: Hot girls go to therapy.
Step 2: Closure
If there’s anybody you need closure with, call them up and get it.
To be clear, we don’t advise picking at old wounds that are better left alone.
But if there’s anyone you truly feel you need closure with before you can move on from what happened in the past, closure could be crucial to your healing.
If there’s anybody whose words or actions after your last breakup are holding you back from letting yourself be happy now, talk to them.
If there’s anybody you (wrongly) feel you disappointed or hurt, talk to them so you can let that misplaced guilt go.
Talk it out, work through it and move past it.
*Grace wants to add: We don’t mean Nathan. Leave that (redacted) in the past.
Step 3: Stop Trying to Make Everyone Else Happy
This one might be the hardest of all. You’re the kindest, gentlest soul that any of us have ever had the pleasure of knowing.
We love your kindness, but we also love and admire your bravery, your honesty, your work ethic, your sense of humor.
Remember: you are more than your ability to make people happy.
Don’t worry so much about being nice and making everybody around you happy that you put your own happiness on the back burner. It’s okay to set healthy boundaries and say no to things that do not feel right for you.
Setting boundaries does not negate your kindness. The people who love you will not leave you for prioritizing your own happiness.
Read those last two sentences again. And again. And again, until you believe it.
Then read it again for good measure.
Step 4: Ask Declan Out
You said you want to choose Declan and you want your actions to reflect that.
So, ask the man out on a date. Go somewhere public.
Take him to Captain’s, or get coffee at The Grind, or go to the beach.
Go somewhere you feel comfortable and let people see you being happy.
You deserve to be happy. You deserve to love out loud without worrying about the repercussions.
It’s okay if you’re never fully comfortable with PDA. I don’t think Declan expects you to make out with him in public to prove how you feel about him. But don’t pull back when you really want to be pulling him closer. Quit putting distance where you don’t want it to be.
Step 5: Tell Declan You Love Him
Tell Declan you love him. You deserve the freedom of being able to say it, and we know he’s waiting to hear it.
Step 6: Live Happily Ever After
Let yourself fall. Declan is ready to catch you.
Remember: If you change your mind down the line, that’s okay, too. We’re pretty sure this is it for you, but you know your heart best. Listen to it.
*Grace wants to add: If he is your happily ever after, then for the love of god, please have some babies with him. They’d be gorgeous.
Read this. Remember it. Live by it – and go get your man.
We love you.
- Olivia, Grace, Cam, Ty and Noah