the general gist of it is: elena’s parents were murdered when she was 18, and she moved to seattle to study under a medium with the intent of wanting to communicate with them/wanting to naively ‘solve’ their murder when the police seemed to just close their case without doing anything. in her early 20s she was basically obsessed with this and was also learning how to manage her very new medium abilities - so she would lose days of her life to trying to commune with spirits and not even realize it. the ex i had in mind was something in her early to mid 20s where they were together, and actually very serious (possibly engaged) but she had trouble letting this go and he basically was like “elena it has to be either this obsession or me” which would have been a completely fair ask. and she did not choose him.