Kristyn Hodgdon
Everything you’re feeling, but didn’t know how to say.
Hashimoto’s Didn't Get the Progressive Overload Memo
The other day, I woke up, fed my three kids breakfast, took them to 9:45 mass, and then rushed the older two to a birthday party at a sports place. After being overstimulated by 30-plus kids for two hours, I came home and took a nap. That's pretty typical for me. I'm the energizer bunny... until I'm not.
The thing is, I actually love working out. But I recently came across a video from McCall McPherson that finally put words to something I've known for years: being active with Hashimoto's requires nuance. Progressive overload, the idea that you keep adding more weight, more reps, more intensity, is the default advice in every fitness app out there. And for most bodies, it works exactly like it's supposed to. For mine, it's a great way to feel amazing on Tuesday and flattened by Wednesday.
Hashimoto's is an autoimmune disease of the thyroid, and about 85% of the time, I don't think about it at all. But push too hard, and my body doesn't just get tired; it stages a full-on protest. Not soreness. Not the good kind of wrecked. More like crushing full-body fatigue that feels like first-trimester exhaustion, and then some.
There's a concept called spoon theory, where every task costs you a unit of energy, and once you're out, you're out, no matter how badly you want to keep going. I don't say it at dinner parties, but it's always in the back of my mind when I'm deciding whether today is a Pilates x Strength day or a "walk the dog around the block" day.
For me, what seems to work is a mix of Pilates and strength training, minus the heavy weights, with real rest days built in between. And walking, which somehow still doesn't feel like 'real' exercise even though it counts every single time.
I may never have a body like Hilary Duff, but at least I'll be able to take care of my kids without being on the brink of collapse, and that's a win.
Nobody Approved That Callaway Ad By Accident
By now you've probably seen it: the Good Good Golf x Callaway ad that opens with a man sprinting across a golf course to shove a woman to the ground because she touched his new driver. Not a metaphor. Not a "bit." A grown man slamming a woman into the turf, standing over her, telling her not to touch his stuff, while a golf company's logo sits in the corner.
I've worked in media for years now, and I know exactly how many hands an ad like that has to pass through before it goes live: writers, editors, brand managers, legal, whoever signs off on the final cut. Someone watched that footage and said yes — not once, but at multiple checkpoints where a no would've been easy (and, dare I say, obvious).
Callaway's CEO has since admitted the video was approved before it posted, calling it a mistake. But a shove that violent doesn't slip past that many eyes by accident. It gets through because somewhere along the way, someone decided it read as edgy, and never stopped to ask who's actually buying the clubs, the memberships, the merch. Spoiler alert: it's women.
According to the CDC, nearly one in four women in the U.S. will experience physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime. That's not rare; it's common enough that most rooms approving that ad probably had someone in them who'd lived it, and just didn't say so. Unless the room was entirely men, which, honestly, is also very possible.
Nobody in those rooms mistook it for fine. My bet is they assumed a woman hitting the ground would read as funny before it read as real — and that's pretty damn scary.
Ask Clara:
"How common is intimate partner violence?"
The Cosmo-Era Advice We Never Thought To Question
Raise your hand if you still think about "day to night" when it comes to picking outfits.
I mean, has that Cosmo-era advice ever even come in handy?
I recently came across this video of a woman who's been parting her hair "the opposite way" for over a decade because Seventeen magazine told her to, in an issue she probably read on her bedroom floor as a teenager. It got me thinking about every random tip 2000s-era magazines planted in our brains that we never once thought to question.
One commenter said she's been shaving her legs with conditioner for over twenty years because of something she read in Teen Vogue back in the day. Twenty years, from one stranger's tip in a magazine that no longer even exists.
I grew up on the same content — clips from Cosmo, Seventeen, and Glamour spread across my bedroom floor in Queens — and the nostalgia of it is genuinely funny to me. What isn't funny is remembering those same magazines telling us to count calories and fear carbs, right on the very next page. I think I speak for most millennial women when I say we didn't separate the two; we just believed all of it.
I've spent years unlearning the food part, but I'm not sure I ever unlearned the reflex underneath it: believing whatever's printed with enough confidence, no questions asked. Which feels a little terrifying now that "printed" has become "posted," and instead of three magazines a month, it's thousands of messages a day, from people whose only credential is that they seem confident on camera.
Twenty years is a long time to keep a hair part because one magazine said so, once, decades ago. It makes me wonder what we're believing right now, from someone with a ring light and zero medical degree, that we'll look back on in twenty years and say, "what the hell were we thinking?"
Am I the Only One Who's Constantly Running Out of Things?
Is it a universal girlhood experience to constantly be running out of things? Shampoo, moisturizer, magnesium supplements — you name it. Almost every day I'm thinking gotta order that, or digging through a cabinet looking for a backup that doesn't exist.
I like to consider myself a product-minimalist. I tout EltaMD's tinted SPF as my holy grail, and I have exactly one bronzer, one blush, one mascara, used until it's completely gone. I am not a nine-products-on-the-counter person, mostly because I've always been acne-prone, and if you know, you know how that story ends.
And yet I still run out of everything, always, at slightly different times, like the whole system's hanging on by a thread.
For a while, I assumed this was just what being an adult woman is: a thing I was supposed to have figured out by now, like everyone else apparently has. But honestly, I think it's an ADHD thing. If a product isn't directly in my line of sight, it doesn't exist to me. I'll walk past an empty shampoo bottle in the shower for four days straight before my brain connects "empty" with "I should order more," and it's been a week since I've seen wash day (which, no judgment if you've been there too).
What bothers me most isn't the running out. It's how wasteful it all feels — the last-minute Amazon order, the guilt of buying something in a panic instead of using up what I already have, the sense that a more organized version of me would've seen this coming.
I don't have a system. I've just accepted that I'll always be a little behind my own bathroom cabinet, buying what I need exactly when I need it, and never a day before.
If you've somehow cracked this, genuinely, tell me. I'll take any tips.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.