Kristyn Hodgdon
Everything you’re feeling, but didn’t know how to say.
Can We Stop Looking at ADHD as a Weakness?
You know what I haven't been doing lately? Blaming things on my ADHD.
Not because it went anywhere. I was diagnosed in my mid-30s, the same year I finally understood why I was always losing my car keys, starting four businesses in my head while making coffee, and never once managing one thing at a time. What changed is I stopped treating it as the explanation for everything that goes wrong, and started noticing when it's responsible for things going right.
That reframe got a boost this week when my mom sent me a video of Mike Repole (Queens guy, my people) talking about how much of his career he credits to the way his brain works. Coming from a guy who sold two beverage companies to Coca-Cola for $9.7 billion, that's not nothing.
I feel it, too. Rescripted is my greatest hyperfixation, and my ability to take risks, pivot quickly, and hold six ideas at once instead of picking one is exactly why it works — even when my process doesn't look like anything you'd find in a business book. It shouldn't have taken me until 37 to believe that about myself.
For years I apologized for the parts of my brain that move too fast, never once realizing those were the same parts building the business, the ones that jump into someone's story at girl dinner before they've finished it and somehow still get the table laughing.
So yes, actually, I do think ADHD is a superpower, just not the TikTok-caption kind. It's the kind that comes with real cost, real chaos, and days you can't get out of your own way — but also real creativity and the kind of momentum most people spend years trying to manufacture.
I just spent thirty-some-odd years only loving myself enough to admit to the first part.
GLP-1s Will Get You a Job and a Boyfriend, Says Science (We Already Knew That)
In the most recent GLP-1 news, a new study out of Harvard found that women are more likely to land a job and find a partner while on the drugs — because of course they are.
I don't say that to be snarky, more that weight has never really been just a health thing for women. It's always doubled as currency, whether we wanted it to or not, and now there's a paper with Harvard's name on it more or less proving it.
Economist Rebecca Diamond tracked thousands of women through the Understanding America Study and found that single women starting a GLP-1 for weight loss were 29 percentage points more likely to be married or living with a partner within a year and a half, and women who weren't working when they started were 27 points more likely to be employed by then. Call it confidence, or call it exactly what Diamond's paper is called: "the female obesity penalty."
But what didn't change is the part that's hard to shake: already-partnered women got no upgrade, already-employed women got no raises, and none of them got healthier. Self-reported health, depression, and loneliness barely moved. The shift wasn't internal; it was other people, deciding differently, the moment there was less of her to see.
Which makes me wonder, do you have to be Ariana Grande for people to notice there's a problem here? Her body has become its own headline, and we're told not to comment on women's bodies until you're actually worried about one.
This study didn't tell us anything new — it just proved we were never being paranoid.
What the Lindsay Clancy Trial Unlocked in Millennial Moms
If you're anything like me, you can't stop scrolling #lindsayclancy — not just for the trial itself, but for what's underneath it: thousands of women saying some version of "I had those thoughts too." Postpartum nurses describing how broken the follow-up system actually is. Moms naming the exact intrusive thought they had, years later, like it's still haunting them (because it probably is).
That's the part nobody predicted: a murder trial is not where you'd expect an entire generation of mothers to finally say the quiet part out loud, but here we are.
Maybe it's because the numbers finally have a face. The CDC puts postpartum depression at about one in eight new moms, and a recent study found barely one in ten get any formal screening, despite ACOG's guidelines. Postpartum psychosis is rarer, closer to one in a thousand, but in this case, it became the whole story.
The thing is, if you've been in it, you know the line between a thought and an impulse can get murky real fast — which is probably why this trial ignited something in millennial moms. How many of us have our own hindsight-is-20/20 moment, the appointment where we said the thing and watched it get filed as nothing? Or never said anything at all, because admitting to it could mean losing our kids, our credibility, our whole identity as someone safe.
A lot of us have been there; the scary part is that only one of us made the news.
Yes, Luteal Phase Anxiety Is a Thing (But There's Also a Fix)
I've spoken a bunch on here about how, after years of infertility, my menstrual cycles are finally "normal." What I didn't expect was the flip side: a really crappy luteal phase, specifically luteal phase anxiety that's worse than anything my irregular cycles ever threw at me.
For years, irregular periods were the whole problem, so getting a monthly preview of what regularly cycling women have dealt with their entire adult lives has been humbling, to say the least.
My doctor's first suggestion was magnesium glycinate, and when I asked if there was actual research behind it (because I don't take anything on faith anymore), there is: a randomized, double-blind crossover study found that 200 milligrams of magnesium combined with 50 milligrams of vitamin B6 significantly reduced anxiety-related premenstrual symptoms — the nervous tension, the mood swings, the irritability — more than either alone.
If magnesium isn't cutting it, SSRIs like sertraline (Zoloft) have some of the strongest evidence behind them for PMDD, and the part that surprised me is that they don't have to be taken every single day. Luteal-phase-only dosing, aka starting after ovulation and stopping when your period arrives, works just as well as taking it continuously.
None of this is groundbreaking, but nobody tells you that the two weeks before your period deserve their own plan and their own patience, not just something you have to white-knuckle through every single month.
This luteal phase has already been so much more manageable than my last twelve, and that's saying something.
Lowering Your Ovarian Cancer Risk Shouldn't Need a Subscription
This week, the New York Times ran a piece that could genuinely lower women's odds of getting ovarian cancer, then put it behind a paywall. I clicked, hit the wall, and did what anyone does in 2026: opened Instagram, where an OB/GYN had already posted the whole answer for free.
The headline is almost unbelievable. The most common, deadliest form of ovarian cancer, responsible for 70% of cases and 90% of deaths, actually starts in the fallopian tubes, not the ovaries. There's no mammogram-style screening for it, but removing the tubes in a quick procedure called a bilateral salpingectomy cuts that risk by nearly 80%, according to the study behind the article.
I'm done having kids. Three was always the plan, although "done" is still a word I'm growing into, since we're still paying to store our embryos. Watching the OB/GYN explain who actually qualifies — mostly women finished building their families, or who know they never want kids at all — I realized it's apparently a five-minute add-on if you're already having any other abdominal surgery, and a real option to bring up even if you're not.
What I still can't get over is that it took an Instagram reel to route around the New York Times, just to learn how to lower my own cancer risk. Information like this shouldn't require a subscription, or even a login — which is part of why Rescripted has never charged for ours. Women don't need one more thing standing between them and their own health.
The real breakthrough this week wasn't the surgery. It was a doctor deciding that information this good doesn't get to hide behind a paywall.
The Real Reason We're All Googling 'Restorative Reproductive Medicine'
I spent part of this week at a fertility conference, sitting in a talk on "restorative reproductive medicine," a term I'd seen floating around fertility TikTok but never actually had explained to me.
Restorative reproductive medicine, it turns out, means trying to find and fix what's actually causing infertility (endometriosis, thyroid stuff, ovulation issues) before anyone mentions IVF. It sounds reasonable in a vacuum, except this isn't happening in one. I did many rounds of IVF over six years to get my kids, and I couldn't unhear that.
My PCOS wasn't diagnosed until my twenties, years after a doctor put me on the pill "to regulate my cycle" and called it a day. I often think about how differently things might have gone if someone had investigated why my cycles were forty-six days long instead of just managing it. Which is why RRM's pitch is appealing, AND why it's worth being skeptical of.
RRM isn't one governing body, and it's not neutral. Its most established version, NaProTechnology, grows out of Catholic medical ethics and excludes IVF, IUI, donor gametes, and surrogacy, shutting out LGBTQ couples and single parents. It's also a talking point for anti-abortion groups pushing state laws, like Arkansas's, that let providers refuse IVF on religious grounds. ASRM calls this ideology dressed up as medicine. One presenter cited unpublished data claiming nearly 40%(!) of RRM providers aren't medically licensed — reason enough to ask exactly what your own provider's license and training actually cover.
In my (very non-medical) opinion, the real issue isn't RRM versus IVF. It's why some patients go looking for alternatives at all — either because IVF is expensive, or it didn't work, and no one explained why.
Two things can be true at once: some of us will always need IVF, and all of us deserve real answers before we get there.
Lindsay Clancy and the Thoughts We Don't Say Out Loud
I don't think I'm alone in not being able to look away from the Lindsay Clancy case — the Duxbury, Massachusetts mom currently on trial for killing her three children. The defense argues she was in the grip of severe postpartum psychosis after being prescribed over a dozen(!) psychiatric medications in four months. The prosecution calls the murders "premeditated." It's truly heart-shattering, to put it mildly.
I'm usually an open book about my path to parenthood, but this is one part I don't talk about enough. When I was about eight weeks postpartum with my twins, after a long fertility journey to get there, I developed postpartum anxiety and OCD. I had intrusive thoughts about driving with my kids in the car, convinced I might suddenly swerve into oncoming traffic, and at one point, I was terrified of being alone with them.
At the time, I couldn't tell if these were feelings I wanted to act on (because why else would my brain be handing them to me), or if they were just thoughts my mind refused to let go of. My therapist helped me draw the line between a thought and an impulse, and my kids' pediatrician encouraged me to go on medication. Lindsay Clancy, despite quite literally begging for help, wasn't so lucky — and the system failed her for it.
Almost nobody outside perinatal psychiatry seems to know that somewhere between 70-100% of new moms report unwanted, intrusive thoughts about their baby being harmed. Most of us never say it out loud, and most of us are never in danger of acting on it. But anyone who's stood in those terrifying shoes, psychosis or not, knows she likely had zero intention of hurting those kids.
Guilty or not, she's already living through the sentence the rest of us got spared: needing help and not getting it soon enough.
The Ultimatum Has Too Much Therapy Speak (and Not Enough Therapy)
I had a 15-hour travel day on Monday, so naturally, I binge-watched the last few episodes of the most recent season of The Ultimatum, and DAMN.
For anyone who hasn't fallen down this particular rabbit hole: it's the show where couples who can't agree on marriage split up, date other people in the cast for three weeks, then decide whether to get engaged to their original partner (or someone new entirely). High stakes, messy execution, and apparently, a whole lot of therapy speak with maybe not a lot of actual therapy happening.
Take Ashley, Killian, Blake, and Hayley's hours-long changeover conversation, for example: boundaries, accountability, manipulation, all of it spoken fluently and none of it actually saying anything productive.
I mean, I get it; I do. "I need to protect my peace" is a much better sentence than "I'm scared and I don't want to talk about this," even though the second one is much closer to the truth. But when Hayley told Blake she was feeling "unheard" because he wasn't performing all five love languages while simultaneously cursing him out, it felt less emotionally intelligent and more unhinged.
I should note: I didn't have any of this language in my early 20s. I didn't know what a trauma response was; I definitely didn't know what boundaries were, and I learned a bunch of life lessons the hard way — so I do give them props for having the right words. But I've also started to wonder if "protecting your peace" can be its own kind of avoidance, albeit a more sophisticated one.
If you're reciting the terms instead of doing the work they're supposed to describe, does that even count as personal growth?
It's probably not a coincidence that the couples who came out okay in the end weren't the ones speaking the most fluent therapy-speak. They just respected each other.
Mom Guilt Has a Peak Season, and It's Summer
I used to love summer. Warm sunshine on my face, a good book in my hand, the salt air wind in my face.
Then I had kids.
I should start by saying we live in a beach town, and summer is still superior to pretty much every other season, with the exception of the lead-up to Christmas (for obvious reasons I won't get into here). But working mom guilt in the summer is the pits.
My kids are either watching TV or in camp — half-day, because we don't have the kind of money it takes to send three kids to all-day, all-summer camp. So most days end around 1:30 p.m., and the rest of it is just me, pulled in eighteen directions, doing none of it at 100 percent.
And then Instagram helpfully reminds me that I only get 18 summers with my kids, so I should be crafting them a screen-free, sprinkler-in-the-backyard, "90s analog summer" instead of handing them an iPad so I can finish a work email. Cool. Thanks. Very relaxing content, very normal amount of pressure to put on a random Tuesday afternoon in July.
A 2026 Afterschool Alliance survey found that more than half of families who want their kid in a structured summer program can't get one, and cost is the reason. Meanwhile, the algorithm is busy convincing us that the real failure isn't the childcare gap; it's that we didn't turn off the TV and make homemade popsicles.
My kids won't remember the camp we couldn't afford. They'll (hopefully) just remember that I was there, laptop and all.
Dense Breast Tissue, Thinner Answers
One of my brother's best friends was just diagnosed with breast cancer at age 33. When he told me, I was taken right back to when my friend Lisa called me (on Christmas morning) to tell me she had the disease.
I've written a lot about my ATM gene mutation, and the strange, specific limbo of knowing you're at higher risk before anything's actually wrong. So when my co-founder Abby, who recently turned 40, mentioned she'd just found out at her mammogram that she has dense breasts, I knew exactly where that conversation would go next. She left with a piece of critical, potentially life-saving health information — and basically no idea what to do with it.
As of September 2024, the FDA now requires every mammography facility in the country to tell patients whether their breasts are dense. Nearly half of women over 40 have dense tissue, and it's a two-for-one problem: it raises your baseline risk and makes cancer harder to spot on a mammogram, since dense tissue and tumors both show up white on the scan. So the women who most need a clear picture are the ones most likely to get a blurry one.
What the FDA doesn't require is what happens after. No mention of a supplemental ultrasound, no explanation of what your actual risk percentage is, just a sentence, maybe a pamphlet, and the door.
When I found out about my ATM mutation, I was told I'd need regular scans for the rest of my life, full stop, with a new prescription required every single time. So I did the research myself and wrote it all down here.
Lisa didn't get the years to figure any of this out. The least the rest of us can do is not have to start from zero.