Even if you don’t identify as an artist or creative, I think you’ll find so many insights and encouragements in this conversation, especially if you’re on your own health journey.

A few of the topics we explored in my conversation with Alex:

Alex’s journey from accounting professional into full-time artist
The impact her experience with chronic, debilitating illness had on her life priorities and career path
How the creative process can speak into the experience of living with chronic and complex health issues (and vice versa)
What it means to hold grief and hope at the same time
The importance of intuition, paying attention to alignment of body/mind/spirit, and being willing to change course
How having limits can fuel creativity and invite clarity

↓ Watch our conversation here:

↓ Or you can listen along here:

(Scroll down for full transcript below)

Meet Alex Hamm

Alex Hamm is a fine artist, illustrator, stationery lover, and amateur astrologer.

She’s the owner of paper goods company Majestik Magnolia, which features bright, colorful illustrations that inspire people to #MagnifyTheMajestik in each day. Alex is obsessed with all things paper and believes it’s always better to send a card.

Inspired by her experiences living with chronic illness, Alex’s mission is to shine a light on community, identity, healing, and the joy of the journey…to Magnify what makes life beautiful and Majestik.

Majestik Magnolia’s designs have been featured in Uppercase Magazine. As a fine artist, Alex is an intuitive abstract painter exploring wonder, connection, and healing. She’s the creator of The MOON CYCLE series, her ongoing body of artwork painted in sync with the changing phases of the moon.

Alex makes the best homemade stovetop popcorn and lives in Colorado, USA with her partner and their pittie rescue Deli Hamm. (Deli can attest about the popcorn.)

Check out some of her lovely work below:

Connect with Alex:

Fine Art

Website: https://alexhammart.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/alexhammart

Illustration

Website: https://majestikmagnolia.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/majestikmagnolia

Unedited interview transcript:

Lindsay Voorhees: Awesome. Great. Oh, hello. Just for introduction, I am Lindsay Voorhees and I get to support folks living with chronic, flaring, fluctuating health conditions, figure out ways to partner with their bodies and to manage life day to day in a kind way. And I also love hearing people's stories and I'm really excited to be chatting with Alex Hamm today who's a fine artist, illustrator, stationary lover, and I think an astrologer or emerging amateur astrologer. And yeah, just really excited to hear about your experiences and thank you so much for being here. And I thought that maybe we could dive in by you just sharing a bit more about who you are as both an artist and a human.

Alex Hamm: Yeah. Thanks so much, Lindsay. And hi. Hello everyone. I'm Alex Ham. I am, like Lindsay mentioned, I'm an artist. I'm an illustrator. I do all of that now. But actually formerly I spent about a decade in accounting field. I'm a former CPA, went to business school, have my MBA and am now a full-time creative artist and creative entrepreneur. My partner and I live in Colorado with our petty rescue pup. Her name is Deli Ham. It's such a good name. I know. Love puns. We love puns. I use puns a lot of my work too, especially the greeting cards I design. And I'm also, I'm an amateur astrologist and tarot card reader. I currently don't do either of those professionally for pay, just for friends and family and fun. But I also incorporate astrology, particularly the moon cycle into my painting and creative practice too. That's actually my main fine art practice right now is I paint in sync with the changing moon phases cycle of the moon.

Lindsay Voorhees: I love that. I just was looking at some of that and noticing you the moon cycles and also some other, just seasonality seems to be one of the many themes that you explore and touch on. Yeah,

Alex Hamm: And above all, I consider myself to be an intuitive artist, definitely in my fine art practice, but even in my illustrative work too. And what I mean by that is when I'm creating work, I don't necessarily first of all set out with an idea of exactly what that artwork is going to look like when I'm done. So I might have an idea I want to explore. I might have a theme that I want to explore or I might have a message that I want to explore, whether that's, if it's a fine art piece, I might have a process or theme emotions that I want to explore or work through. Or if it's a greeting card, obviously my creative work is very broad in terms of the types of work that I'm doing. But if it's a greeting card and I have a specific message that I want to have on the card or have communicated to a recipient, then that might inform that too.

Alex Hamm: And so with that intuitive practice, it's not necessarily about having a specific image that I want to create, but more of a connection or experience that I want to encourage a recipient or a participant to be able to have when they're interacting with that artwork. Whether they're receiving the card and they're feeling a sense of companionship and a sense of community when they receive that card from someone, or if they're looking at a piece of artwork on a wall that they feel connected to themselves or they feel connected to that place or that community, that person, wherever that artwork happens to be hanging. So in that way, I consider myself an intuitive artist most concerned about not what it looks like, but how it is experienced.

Lindsay Voorhees: Yeah. I love that, the intuitive piece. And to me that sounds very like letting the process guide and letting things emerge, which as somebody who's not a fine artist, it sounds a lot like how we have to do life as humans. So it sounds maybe less scary for those who are interested in exploring creative process and just also helps connect to your work as well.

Alex Hamm: It does, yeah. And for me, I did spend a decade in accounting career in accounting, especially, I worked for publicly traded companies and corporate accounting departments, which are held to very strict regulatory standards is they should be. But what that means is as an employee charged with following those standards, it could be really stressful and there could be a lot of things that were just yes or no that was this done correctly, yes or no? Was this done on time, yes or no? That very strict set of rules that needed to be followed again with reason. And so I used to draw very and create very figuratively and realistically earlier in my life and now exclusively my fine art practice. I'm primarily an abstract painter because of the freedom of being able to trust the process and know that and the choice to say, I don't have to know exactly how this is going to end up.

Alex Hamm: I don't have to know exactly where I'm going with this, but I am going to take the first next step and then I'm going to trust that I'm going to know what to do after that. I'm going to trust that I'm going to have the tools that I need to continue on. I'm going to trust that I have the right paint colors or I'm going to have the right technique, or I'm going to know what to do to keep adding, to let all of those experiences and all of those tiny little brush strokes build together to create something better than I could have initially experienced. So it's also freedom for me because I did have to live life in such a rigid manner in my former career.

Lindsay Voorhees: Did you, and there might be a few different answers to this, but how did you get into it? Just there could have been lots of different entry points to your art practice. I don't know what language you use for that, but was it almost to balance that other really kind of strict, stringent life? Was it kind something on the side at that time?

Alex Hamm: I love that question. So I've as always the kid always drawing and coloring and always had a coloring book or a notebook, whatever. In high school, I did art classes in high school. I did AP art in high school. When I went to college, I intended to major in marketing and minor in art. At the time, I wanted to do magazine advertisements. I used to love magazines. I know magazines still exists. I don't think they're as popular now as they were. But everyone had magazine subscriptions, at least when I was a teenager. And I love the advertisements. I looked at the other stuff in the magazine too, but I thought that the advertisements were just so creative and so interesting. I mean, you really have to be, make them send out to people when that's not what they're going to the magazine for. And so that's what I wanted to do.

Alex Hamm: But I started college in 2008 and I declared a major during that first year, which was also during the 2008 recession. And so in my network of people that I knew that had been doing marketing, a lot of them were getting laid off unfortunately during those years. And I was in my intro accounting 1 0 1 class that every business major has to take, and I had the highest grade in that class. My teacher asked me, she was like, have you thought about majoring in accounting? You're my best student this semester. I want to encourage you to think about it. And I told her, no, absolutely not. That's not what I want to do. And she's like, well, what do you want to do? Told her, and she said, well, right now, job market is tough if you ever, and I told her, I think I may want to work for myself in the future. I don't really know, but I want to have options. And she said, well, I want to encourage you to think about it. This was a school in Tennessee at the time. My university had the only program in the state of Tennessee where you could get your bachelor's and master's at the same time if you majored in accounting. A lot of schools do that now, but they were the only one then.

Alex Hamm: And she said that for people, especially if you are ever considering going into business for yourself, if you are willing to spend a few years learning accounting and doing accounting, it's a lot easier to learn the financial side of a business and then do something else later and learn the other parts, especially if they're more interesting to you anyway than it is to learn something else and then learn on the fly. The financial side, just so complicated. So I had no plans to go to grad school, but when that option was just laid on the table for me, it was such a wonderful opportunity that I couldn't pass up. I took that advice. I'm thankful I did. I have learned a lot over my accounting career. I can't say I particularly enjoyed most of my accounting career. It definitely contributed to the stress and the chronic illness that I experienced when you're doing work that is not meant for you or you're in environments that are stressful or perhaps not in alignment with your nature or your spirit.

Alex Hamm: But I'm still very grateful for that experience. And then as I worked in accounting up until 2022 and just over the last few years of my career, I really recognize an initially I wanted to learn and then transition out. I've got to transition out because I was bedbound with chronic illness in December, 2021, completely bedbound. I couldn't even hold my phone laying on the bed. I couldn't hold my phone to use my thumb. I was so fatigued. And it was very clear to me in recognizing I was not going to be able to heal and continue to get better the way that I knew I could and deserve to as long as I was still working in the environments that I was working in. Not necessarily that there's anything inherently wrong with them, but they just weren't a fit for me and the lifestyle that I needed for my health, and I've been creating all this time anyway. But then really began to shift my focus from okay, drawing and creating and painting for myself. It's probably always for myself for and foremost, but then reflecting on, okay, well if I'm creating this for myself, other people probably need these messages too. What might resonate with others? And that's kind of how I shifted my focus into how I create my new work to be able to share that encouragement for others. And then it shifted into the business that it is now.

Lindsay Voorhees: Thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah. It just strikes me, you mentioned being an intuitive creator artist before and the intuition and connection to yourself in that moment of December, 2021 and going into the next year, I presume, of having to make a hard decision and knowing that something big needed to shift, and maybe that seems obvious, but to choose to exit probably a relatively stable right context,

Alex Hamm: Financially stable. Yes.

Lindsay Voorhees: But that was not the right place and fit, and your body was telling you that. That just seems like it does take that intuitive connection, willingness to honor and listen to that. I'm so glad that has brought you to this place where you get to be more reconnected and in the work that you a decade or so ago, hoping and that you can synthesize all of that together. But yeah, just that moment really strikes me. And I'm curious, as much as you feel comfortable just sharing a bit more of your health journey, and I say healing and you use that word, and I just want to clarify for us and for anyone listening that don't mean that in a medicalized, I don't have any symptoms kind of way because I don't really think that's what healing as one's very personal experience is. So I'll let you, that's very open to your own interpretation. But yeah, just what that process has been like for you and how art and creativity has fit in, if that feels right.

Alex Hamm: Yeah, I love that question. So I think first, I think I love your description of healing. I also agree that I don't think it's a final destination that you can say, oh, I'm healed. I'm healed, I'm recovered, I'm cured. I have no physical symptoms. I don't believe that's a reality. And I also firmly believe that our bodies are the guardians of our spirits. There are ancient texts that describe the body as the temple. Your body is a temple. And I don't mean that in a religious context, but very often, traditionally in ancient cultures, temples were also places of they were sacred and they were locations of guarding what is sacred. They were guarding something and they were also protectors. Symbols served as protection for something that a culture treasured. And so in thinking of it in that context, I think I reflect on that a lot in terms of healing and related to symptoms, how my physical body is feeling and how my spirit is feeling is that if the body is the guardian of my spirit, if am experiencing changes in my body, uncomfortable or comfortable, that it's looking to tell me something, it wants me to know something.

Alex Hamm: It wants my spirit to wake up to something, it wants my mind to wake up to something. And so when I think about healing, I really think in terms of is my mind, is my body and is my spirit, are they hearing one another? Are they listening to one another? And are they meeting one another's needs? Are they in as much alignment as they could be in that moment? And when they are separated, when we feel disassociated from the present moment or when we feel like our present experience doesn't match what our desires are, what we know we want to be doing or feeling or experiencing, then those are also the moments I think that are invitations and to get curious and listen of, okay, if I'm in this job and I've spent all these years getting my accounting degree and getting my master's and sitting for the CPA exam and all the tears cried over anyone who's done any sort of really hard exam or professional examination, it's just a really hard stressful experience.

Alex Hamm: And to think, okay, well, I've done all of this, I've put so much effort and heart into it, and I can know that that I've done that, but now that I'm doing it physically, I just don't feel right, something I'm not meant to be here. My body is just not settled. It can't get settled. And so recognizing that, and it took me years, years to recognize that unsettling feeling that I have had, but getting them all in alignment to a point of just being able to listen to what they have to say. And then it can be really scary when you recognize that you are on a path that or you're in, and this could be a job or it could be a relationship or a friendship or hobby, whatever it is that you're on a path that ultimately is not meant for you or for your highest good is not serving you.

Alex Hamm: Or you may love something but it doesn't love you back the way that you deserve it to or you need it to. That could even just be a food that has always been a favorite food. Those of us with chronic illness might have experienced the need to say, no, thank you right now to certain foods while we heal. And I've had to do that many times and it's really hard and scary. And also taking that leap of courage is also part of the healing process and part of healing to recognize that I'm in a moment that is uncomfortable or is not fully in alignment for what I need or who I am or who I want to be. And I'm going to choose to do an uncomfortable thing, but it's going to be my choice so that I can receive what I need. And that doesn't mean that I will have no physical symptoms in the future. That doesn't mean I will have no emotional discomforts or no mental discomforts, but it means that I'm choosing. I think healing means choosing to put your highest good as the priority. And I recognize that that long description got a little maybe every thrill. But

Lindsay Voorhees: No, I love it.

Alex Hamm: I think I attend these days to reflect more on the spirit world sometimes than the physical, physical playing sometimes. And I think a lot of healing is more spiritual than we or comfortable giving credit to sometimes.

Lindsay Voorhees: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so much of that is soaking in as you shared, and the word alignment, which is one of those words out there in the world that can sometimes lose meaning. But that sense of having a sense of what your true north or whatever reference point, your anchor, whatever that is, and coming back to that and having to do that continually. And we are not cars, but I do think about, okay, my tires get out of the line, but it's not a one time thing. Like you said, it's this iterative process. And we certainly live in culture at large that is pretty disembodied. And by that aware of bodies, but not as whole beings, like you said, in body and spirit. Those have all gotten separated. Now we're trying to put them all back together. Well, if we never separated them all out, we would have a sense of that.

Lindsay Voorhees: Of course, these things are related of course, when there's something off or we're not being able to attend to one part of self, and then of course that connects to other people outside of ourselves that there are increasingly loud pieces of feedback in our lives. Right? Yeah, there was another word that was resonating and that was well too curiosity and invitation. And I just love that you shared those and held them knowing how hard the journey, it's not an easy journey. And I find I don't always offer those words to folks when we're first meeting because it can almost skew or sound like it's skewing in the direction of a toxic positivity, or this is supposed to be you learning a lesson, but coming from a place of deep learning from your own experience and hearing that invitation and curiosity are part of it as well as I'm sure there were times of this is the worst, and I hate that. It's all real valid human experiences and response specifically about chronic

Alex Hamm: Health. And we hold our grief and our joy in the same hands too. Both things can be true. We can be having, I dunno, a really hard experience that's just a miserable, at one point, I had five or six safe foods we're talking like chicken, rice, sweet potatoes, broccoli, maybe. And I feel like maybe there was one other thing. It was a really short list. And so I think it's really important to honor those really sucky moments. It's important to honor those. Sometimes there's nothing else to say except this sucks, and that's all there is to it. That's all we need to honor that for ourselves, and we need to honor that for the people around us who are experiencing that.

Alex Hamm: So I think there's the duality of it, of accepting that sometimes we have very real limits and we can know and hope and believe that yeah, one day I'm going to be able to eat more foods than these five foods one day I'm going to. But today is not that day and it is not helpful. And it's also at the same note, it sucks that I can't eat more than five foods, but it's also not helpful for me to dwell on that and say, stuck there. My dog is barking. Let me know if it gets too

Alex Hamm: Loud. No, you're good loud. That's deli hamm. Everyone, if you can hear, it's not helpful for me to dwell on that and get stuck there. And so it's important to acknowledge I have limits. They're very real. Chicken is the protein I can eat right now. Eggs. My body is not loving eggs right now. My body is not loving. Fill in the blank. That's okay. I don't need, it's not helpful for me to try and force something onto my body that it's not in a place where it can utilize right now. And that can be really hard. And I can still hold the now down the road I can hold gratitude for, or the discipline that I gave myself in the time that, okay, these are my five foods, I'm going to eat them. And I can also show gratitude for the creativity found in those limits of like, okay, as I have five foods, I'm going to see how many different combinations of things I can make with these five foods. Let's figure it out. And as the list grew, I was able to have more creativity and use it that way. But it still just sucks sometimes. And there's a balance between honoring the current limitations and holding hope for the future without crossing the line into toxic positivity and without also digging down too deep into toxic negativity too. There's a range.

Lindsay Voorhees: Yeah. I mean that both and to me is really the heart of mindfulness, not listening to a meditation app, but mindfulness to our experiences of holding, like you said, the joy and the grief and so many other things that sometimes feel like they come from the same bucket. Grief and gratitude are not, those can both, we can experience and live into. And the balance will shift, like you said.

Lindsay Voorhees: Yeah. I love hearing you name, and you said this phrase of how limits can spark creativity. And I'm curious if you have any other ideas or thoughts are just, as an artist and a creative and as a human who's experienced or experiencing chronic illness, how does the creative process or creativity more broadly inform? And that doesn't have to be as heady as it sounds, but my background is very different. I'm a dancer mover, and I've just been thinking to myself and with some clients about the space around improvisation and just having to pivot. And so I'm just, that's all I'll say on my thoughts. But yeah, how does creativity fit in there or influence, or how do they influence each other?

Alex Hamm: Yeah, so I think when it comes to creativity and limits, I think sometimes it can be tempting to go down the line of thought of, oh, if I only had all the time in the world, or if I had all the budget in the world to buy the paint, I want the size canvas I wanted, you wouldn't believe what I could do. Or if I could eat any food that I wanted for those of us in the chronic illness club, if I could eat any food that I wanted, you wouldn't believe what beautiful meals I would cook or what I would prepare.

Alex Hamm: But in reality, there's the saying that necessity is the mother of all invention for a reason. And I think you actually use more creativity when you have limits and when you have parameters that you're starting from, some of you have may have seen studies that show when kids have a room full of toys that they actually play less, that they're jumping from thing to thing to thing. But if they have less toys, they actually play longer, they're more focused. And it's the same in the creative, I think, in creative practice. So in terms of creating visual art right now, I'm very fortunate in the home we live in, we have an extra bedroom that I use as my home studio. I have the space to work on large canvases, but formally we lived in a 500 square foot studio condo, no doors except for the restroom.

Alex Hamm: It was just wide open. So I worked at the kitchen table, or I worked on a TV stand in front of the couch. That is where I worked. That is a space that I had. And so anything that I worked on had to fit on a small paper, and it had to be small in size. The materials that I use had to dry quickly so that I could either keep going or I could put things away, and that was fine. And so I would say for people who want to be creative, I want to encourage you that it's not about having the ideal environment. You're already in the ideal environment wherever you are, you can create and that you can create based on what you have available. If you don't have a large amount of space watercolor on smaller form pages might be your jam right now.

Alex Hamm: I bet you can create some beautiful, beautiful work doing that later on. If you reach a point where you have larger space to work on larger pieces, then go for it. But right now, use what you have. For those of you like me, who in chronic illness have needed to reduce the number of foods that they eat comfortably, and they have a list of safe foods that they can always eat. I want to encourage you to let that be your creativity. If you have 10 foods that you can reliably eat all the time, how many different combinations can you make for your meals out of those same foods?

Alex Hamm: I promise it's actually infinite. It is going to be infinite. You might make some weird things. You may not like some of them, or you may love some of them and create something new that no one's had before or thought of before. And when you do, I hope you share it with all of us so we can make it too sure. We probably share some of the same food, food limitations and food needs. And so I would also argue that it's your limitations, your present limitations that might actually be your greatest strength and give you the direction that you need to go if you're trying in creativity. And I see this in the artist community a lot, and I've seen it a lot in myself too, that we have so many ideas. We have so many ideas, and we have more ideas than we can ever execute on.

Alex Hamm: You don't need to try and do all of those ideas that you have in your head. And I want to give you permission to say, that's a great idea. I don't need to do that right now as much as you need to. And some of them, if you have limits or if you have constraints, you're not going to be able to in this moment. That doesn't mean never, but it might mean right now it's just not in the cards that is, okay. So for me, during particular challenging seasons of chronic illness, when I have been mostly limited in mobility and bed, something that has been helpful for me to still have a creative practice is to draw on my iPad while in bed.

Alex Hamm: That's a really easy way to apologize. There was a on do not disturb mode, but the Google phone voice always ignores that un ringings in the middle of things. But what drawing on the iPad where I otherwise had low energy, I didn't have to worry about washing paintbrushes or swapping out color. Just very quickly, draw, use whatever you have in that moment. And then it's from those digital drawings that I've done, that's made it a lot easier for me to grow my stationary line because it's a lot easier to create files from digital work than it is from analog work.

Lindsay Voorhees: love both the zoomed out kind of lessons from that, but then also the very specific thank you for those very specific invitations and possibilities. And I think what I hear you saying is, or this is how I'm translating it, is even when not everything is possible, and that's true for all humans. We like to pretend all things are possible, we're limitless. There are decks of cards out there that tell us these things. But when you're in a place where it's very clear that not everything is possible, it can be very clarifying in so many ways and direction with your creative process. But also when I'm talking to people around limited energy, you do have to prioritize and make choices about what is most important to you. And so there is a sacrifice and loss in that. And there's also this sense of, if not empowerment, like this invitation to be really honest about, yep, I just can't do it all. That's always been true, but it's very clear right now, and I do get to make certain choices, and this is what I choose. And just not letting that fall by the wayside because there's so much that isn't in one's control that it can be easy to just let it go. So I just love hearing you just reframe that for us.

Alex Hamm: Yeah, thank you. And then I would just also add echo. We all have limits. Those of us and bodies that may experience chronic illness and also folks in abled bodies and also all of nature. All of nature also has limits. And acorn tree might dream of being a cactus in the desert. It is never going to be a cactus in the desert. It is going to be an acorn tree, and that is okay. And we love it for that. And also knowing that it's an acorn tree, it can focus on as an acorn tree. These are the things that I do as an acorn tree versus a cactus. These are the things that I do as a cactus and even as an artist in design and as artists develop a body of work and as artists become known for a specific style or theme, we are always encouraged to, as we grow our body of work, to decide what we will do and what we will not do.

Alex Hamm: And some of that may be limited based on your experience, your skills or factors outside of your control. And some of them are deliberate choices. And for me, one of the things, some of the limits that I have chosen for my artistic Excel with my cards, I do all my own fonts. This is if I'm not going to do an illustration where my font that I draw myself isn't going to look good, or when I draw something, I keep things very simple. I do commission work in my fine art practice, but I do not paint realistic anymore. I've chosen not to do that. I don't enjoy it, so I don't, I've chosen those limits for myself. And also my body's kind of chosen those limits for me too, because I get to, I've lived a life of following the rules for too long. I need more freedom and expression than that.

Alex Hamm: That yes, there are limits that maybe outside of your control that can feel really hard and scary to surrender to. But you also have the power to choose your own limits that then give you the freedom to say, okay, well, I don't do these things because every time you say no to something deliberately, it frees up your energy to say yes to something else on purpose. But if you're too focused on the nos on what you're having to say no to, or what you're choosing to say no to, you're going to miss all of your yeses. So if I'm stuck on I can't eat cheese, I can't eat cheese, I miss cheese, I can't eat cheese, then I'm going to miss out on the very long list of other foods that I can't eat enjoyably and safely and that my body can't get enough of. And that also tastes really good too.

Lindsay Voorhees: Yeah. Yeah. I wonder, when you were talking about the acorn tree, I also thought about seasonality and right now or transitioning into fall and that practice of release, and I've just been thinking about how that makes room for whatever comes next, even if it's not really right in that moment. And that sounds really relevant to this, creating what is, and then what I'm letting go of, whether those are expectations or part of a creative practice where I define what I do and do not do. So love that interweaving. And yeah, I hope that folks take to heart the message that no one is unlimited. And that's actually really beautiful. I think that would be quite boring if we could do and be everything. Who would we be? I don't know. Maybe that's a bit out there. But yeah, I think those choices are, even when it's not something, there are some things that are chosen for and kind of thrust upon us even how we choose to respond to that. And those situations makes you and makes me and make, I dunno. Yeah.

Alex Hamm: Well, and it's so much more interesting, and you can appreciate it more when you know that other people have faced blockages or challenges, you can appreciate what they've been able to, how they've been able to keep showing up for themselves and the people around them so much more. Do that for yourself too. Do that for yourself too. People make jokes about, or sometimes frown upon people who are from wealthy families who look or appear like they had everything handed to them and they didn't have to work for anything. And I would probably, in most cases, they probably have their own challenges that they're having to navigate. But also just know that your own challenges, they're really hard, but they might bring something special out that you would've never dreamed of otherwise. And I want to be clear, I'm not saying that your pain happens for a reason, or my pain happens for a reason, or that everything happens for a reason. I don't believe that. But I do believe that sometimes our most challenging moments are those painful moments that we experiences and those limits that we have, that if we would like them to be, we can choose to let them be guidance or fuel or invitation to grow and to a greater purpose than just hurt.

Alex Hamm: Let it mean more than, oh, this hurt me, that if I wanted to, I can say, oh, this hurt me. It sucked. I didn't deserve that, and I'm going to choose to do some good with this. There's no time. There's no timeline. It might also be a hurt that you don't need to do anything with except honor that this hurt. That's okay too.

Lindsay Voorhees: Yeah. Oh, Alex, you've offered us so much encouragement already, but I'm just wondering if there's anything still percolating or resonating that you just want to name or say or share as we wrap this conversation up? I promised I would wrap us up on time, and I've probably already gone over, but

Alex Hamm: Well, and I talk a lot. I have all my friends and my husband and I just have on let them know it's standing knowledge. If I'm not getting to a point, they're pretty good at like, okay, redirecting me or keeping,

Lindsay Voorhees: I love the winding journey, so I'm not good at that.

Alex Hamm: But something I did want to share is that there was, and the nature of limits and echoing that is that there is a man in my community growing up. I grew up in a really small town in Tennessee. Really, really small town. Everybody knew everybody. You could do the littlest thing as a kid and end up in the paper, in the town paper. They needed content and they also wanted to celebrate everybody. But there was a man in my community growing up, he was disabled. He had a lot of physical limitations, so you wouldn't get to see him out a lot unless it was just at the store or something. He just couldn't, couldn't really get out to the ball games or couldn't get out to the band concerts, to the community things. But he kept up with all of it. He would ask people how it was, he would check.

Alex Hamm: He would check the paper, and we would all receive cards from him after, Hey, congrats on winning the ball game. Congrats on winning the band, competition, whatever it was. And I really can't remember how it came up, but I was talking with him one day, and maybe I asked him why he sent all of us cards all the time. I don't know the tact of a teenager, of a kid, but he said, there's a lot I can't do. I can't walk very far, very long. I leave my house for very long, but I can write cards. I can deal with that all day. And it really stuck with me. The idea of he wasn't, and I'm sure he had experienced his own journey, but in that moment, he wasn't focused on what he couldn't do. He was focused on what he could do.