Welcome to Dear Prudence, I'm your Prudence,

Jene Desmond Harris.

Today we'll be offering readers advice about whether it's okay to reject holiday gifts, how to cope

when participating in a charity turkey giveaway pisses you off, and what to do when your best friend

won't read your book.

Here to help me out are Kate Spencer and Dory Schaffir.

They are the co-host of Forever 35,

a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves.

Dory also co-hosts Matt and Dory's excellent adventure,

which is all about navigating infertility and IVF.

They're both authors who've written both memoirs and novels

and they're both my good friends in my head

because I have been listening to their podcast for so many years. Thank you for joining me

guys. Oh my gosh, thanks for having us. Thank you. This is a real honor so I hope to do our best.

I hope you do your best too. So before we get started I'm to ask each of you to give just one piece of unsolicited

advice.

Kate, we'll start with you.

Sure, my advice is to always assume that whoever you are dealing with in your day-to-day life is having the worst day of their lives.

So whenever I have an interaction that is, especially if it's upsetting or off-putting, I always try to remember

that I do not necessarily know what the other person is going through and to try to kind of mitigate my response and my big feelings with that in mind.

And if you can't tell I have two children, so this is probably a conversation that I have a lot with them also but it is something that has really made a difference for me to kind of take a pause and like consider what somebody else might be experiencing that I am not aware of

that they might be bringing to whatever interaction we are having. So smart, it's not

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