Kristyn Hodgdon
Everything you’re feeling, but didn’t know how to say.
Wait, Is Alex Cooper Actually the Victim Here?
If you've been on TikTok for any amount of time recently, you've likely come across a video about the Alex Cooper vs. Alix Earle feud that nobody has fully explained.
It's still unresolved, but the more I see, the more I'm #TeamAlix. Anecdotal reports just suggest that she's an actually nice person — while this week, a Vanity Fair exposé came out about Alex Cooper's company being a toxic place to work, and her husband Matt Kaplan being, by all accounts, the absolute worst.
I literally signed up for a free trial of Vanity Fair yesterday to read the story (that's a whole other issue), and it gave me almost nothing.
What it did give me, though, was this: most of the decisions at Unwell are apparently made by Matt Kaplan. Not Alex. Her husband. The one allegedly screaming at employees, commenting on their bodies, asking about their sex lives. The one who, when someone called a move against Alix Earle a little mean-girl, said: "We're all mean girls at this company."
Unwell built its entire identity on women saying the thing they're not supposed to say. Create the space, say the quiet part out loud, make women feel less alone. That's the whole brand.
And yet the more I read, the more I kept thinking: what if Alex is less the villain here than we think? What if she's just the name on the door?
That's not an excuse. But it might be the more honest story, and honestly, it's a sadder one.
The Rage-y Middle-Aged Woman Trope Has Got to Go
Can we talk about the perimenopause storyline in Your Friends & Neighbors?
For those of you who don't watch the show: Jon Hamm plays a disgraced hedge fund manager who starts robbing his wealthy Westchester neighbors to maintain his lifestyle. Amanda Peet plays Mel, his ex-wife, a therapist who, by season two, has been fired, dumped, and completely iced out of her friend group, all more or less at once. It's a lot. The show is great.
Was Mel the most likable character in season one? Not necessarily. But this feels like they couldn't figure out what else to do with her in season two, so they said: let's make her a rage-y middle-aged woman with hot flashes.
And here's the thing — it's not that far from the truth of it. Waking up in drenched sheets. The mood that arrives before you even realize it has. Maybe a little vaginal atrophy nobody talks about but apparently Apple TV will. The writers clearly did their research. But it still feels a little forced, like perimenopause is doing the narrative heavy lifting instead of Mel actually getting a storyline.
There's a difference between a show that portrays perimenopause accurately and one that uses it to explain why a woman is difficult. The symptoms can be right and the framing still be off. And I think that's what's nagging at me — because when it's done well, you feel seen. When it's not, you just feel like a punchline with night sweats.
Women going through perimenopause deserve better writing. Even, especially, when the writing is better than usual.
Ask Clara:
"Why does perimenopause make me so angry?"
The Protein We Missed While Counting Points
I was on Weight Watchers in high school. Not because my mom suggested it or a doctor recommended it — because that was just the air we were breathing in the early 2000s. Less was more. Smaller was better. Points were currency, and I spent mine accordingly. The goal, always, was to take up less space. (And if you've been on the internet lately, you know we're not exactly far from that in 2026.)
It took me an embarrassingly long time to unlearn that. And when the conversation finally shifted — when "eat more protein" started replacing "eat less everything" — something in me genuinely relaxed. We were talking about building something instead of subtracting it. Muscle, strength, a body that could actually do things. I was on board.
But here's what didn't make it into the protein conversation, at least not loudly enough: not all proteins do the same job. Collagen — the most abundant protein in your body, the one that holds your bones, joints, skin, and connective tissue together — isn't something you get from a whey shake or a chicken breast. It's a completely different protein, and most of us aren't getting nearly enough of it from food alone.
Your body starts producing less of its own collagen around age 25, losing roughly 1-1.5% per year. By your late 30s, you feel it: in your joints, in recovery time, in the general sense that your body needs a little more support than it used to.
I spent years optimizing for smaller. Turns out what I actually needed was to optimize for stronger.
NativePath Collagen Peptides is one flavorless scoop that dissolves into whatever you're already drinking. A simple place to start.
When Everything Is Fine (And That's the Problem)
Does anyone else get anxiety when things are good?
Give me a trip to labor and delivery almost three months early and I'll be calm as a cucumber — true story — but give me the first summer in three years where I'm not postpartum, pregnant, or actively trying to get pregnant, and I'll be a ball of nerves.
That's kind of where I'm at right now.
I'm happier than I've been in years. My family finally feels complete. It's summer and I live in a beach town. My kids are at ages that are genuinely fun — not "fun because I love them unconditionally" fun, but actually, legitimately fun. And yet, I've been through enough to know that the other shoe can drop at any time.
There's actually a name for this: anticipatory anxiety, the kind that flares not in crisis but in the calm between them. After years of fertility treatments, high-stakes waiting, and pregnancies where you held your breath through every scan, your nervous system starts treating peace like a red flag. The threat didn't change; you just stopped having a reason to white-knuckle it.
Social media doesn't help — it has a way of showing up right when you've let your guard down and reminding you of everything that could go sideways.
But despite all of it, I'm trying to let summer actually be summer, to live in the moment instead of bracing for whatever comes next.
It turns out the hardest thing about finally being okay is trusting yourself to stay there.
The Hair Talk That Wasn't About Hair
Earlier today, my hairdresser and I were deep in conversation about hair — specifically, how neither of us was ever really taught how to take care of ours. No one showed us the right way to wash it, what our texture actually needed, or why everything we tried in our teens and twenties seemed to make it worse (hi, Suave extra control styling gel). We figured it out eventually, in our 30s, mostly through trial and error and the occasional humbling TikTok.
I told her I've been trying to do it differently with my daughter — teaching her the things I had to learn the hard way, whether that's hair, or her body, or how to actually listen to what it's telling her.
Which is also, not coincidentally, my entire job.
Researchers contributing to Women and Health, a new book co-edited by Boston University School of Public Health professor Yvette Cozier, surfaced a stat this week that I haven't been able to shake: women live an average of five years longer than men in the United States, but spend 25% more of their lives in poor health. Longer, but not better. More years, more suffering.
I think about that a lot — while managing an autoimmune disease I only half understand, scrolling through wellness advice that somehow makes me feel worse, and watching everyone around me chase a version of health that looks more like a second job than an actual life. We were never taught how any of this works. We inherited confusion and were handed a supplement routine in its place.
My daughter is seven. She has time. And I have just enough hard-won information to make sure she spends a little less of her longer life figuring it out alone.
The Best Thing My Parents Gave Me (Wasn't a Thing)
There's a particular feeling at the bottom of the ninth — two outs, bases loaded, the whole stadium holding its breath — where your body stops belonging to you and becomes part of something bigger. I grew up on that feeling. Queens girl, Italian family, the kind of house where sports was just part of how we showed up for each other.
I was in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium for the three-peat: '98, '99, 2000. My mom, my dad, my brother, all of us crammed into those seats like it was the most natural place in the world to be. You didn't need to explain it. It was just part of us, like Sunday sauce and big goodbyes.
So when the Knicks won their first championship in 53 years last week and New York lost its mind in the streets, I felt it even from Long Island. A grief specialist named Barri Leiner Grant wrote about it afterward, calling it "collective effervescence" — the electricity that runs through a crowd when everyone is hoping for the same thing at the same time. Strangers becoming a we.
I was a softball player, a cheerleader, and a musical theater kid in high school, and what I remember most isn't the wins. It's the feeling of being on a team, of something mattering to a whole group of people at once. My son plays baseball now. My daughter swims. And I am, it turns out, exactly the kind of parent who loses her mind from the sidelines (respectfully, of course).
I didn't fully understand then what my parents were giving me in those bleachers. I just thought we were watching baseball.
Nobody Told Me Collagen Starts Declining in Your 20s
Nobody handed me a pamphlet at 25 that said: heads up, your collagen production just peaked, and it's declining from here. There was no mention of it at any of my annual physicals, no footnote in the prenatal vitamin instructions, no asterisk next to the daily SPF recommendation.
We talk to young women about sun damage and calcium and folic acid — all important! — and somehow skip entirely over the protein that makes up most of their bones, holds their joints together, and starts quietly disappearing right around the time they're just figuring out their lives.
Collagen is the most abundant protein in your body. It's the structural foundation of your skin, yes, but also your bones, tendons, cartilage, and connective tissue. Production peaks in your early-to-mid twenties and then drops by roughly 1-1.5% per year after that, gradually at first, then faster when estrogen falls in perimenopause. By 50, you've lost roughly a quarter of your peak levels.
The reason most of us don't get enough through food is straightforward: collagen lives in the bones, skin, and connective tissue of animals, and most of us don't eat that way anymore. Our grandmothers made bone broth because that's how you used the whole animal. We eat chicken breasts and protein bars, which are great, and also not the same thing.
I'm not saying this to add another wellness “thing” to your list. I'm saying it because I genuinely wish someone had told me sooner — ideally before I spent a decade not thinking about it at all.
NativePath Collagen Peptides is one flavorless scoop that dissolves into whatever you're already drinking. A simple place to start.
We Need to Talk About Yesteryear
Hate-reading a book about trad-wife influencers wasn't on my bingo card for 2026, but alas, here we are.
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke was one of my most anticipated reads of the year — a buzzy debut about Natalie, a five-million-follower tradwife influencer with a sourdough starter and a suspiciously perfect Idaho ranch, who wakes up one morning in 1855 and has to actually live the life she'd been selling.
Because of the parallels to real-life influencers like Ballerina Farm, I was pulled in from the very first page: the prairie dresses, the half-a-dozen children, the husband (who is a complete and total loser, which somehow makes it all worse), and then, behind the scenes — the nannies, the production companies, the inherited airline money running the whole operation (and, shockingly, never pictured).
Despite not being able to put it down, the book made me uncomfortable in a way I wasn't expecting. I kept waiting for the moment it would all click into place, but the satisfying cultural takedown I was anticipating never came. Instead, it went from Ballerina Farm to Ruby Franke real quick. Remember her? The mom influencer whose wholesome Christian parenting content turned out to be concealing something genuinely horrifying. Yeah, that.
In the end, I can't tell if I loved it, hated it, or need to just take it at face value for what it is: a wild ride. But maybe those are all the same thing.
My Workout Routine Has ADHD (And I'm Not Mad About It)
For the past six or seven months, I've been consistently showing up to Pilates reformer classes at a local studio — getting out of the house (a non-negotiable when you work from home in New York in January), finding community, and rebuilding strength after my third baby. It worked. I loved it. I got into genuinely great shape.
And then I got bored.
Did I mention I have ADHD?
This is the part nobody talks about: something can be working, can be good, can be the thing that finally clicked, AND your brain can still tap out without warning. It's not a character flaw. It's just how I'm wired. So instead of forcing it, I leaned in and went back to what's always been my fallback: working out at home.
Here's what I'm loving right now. Fit with Coco for mat Pilates — low impact in the best possible way, the kind where you're shaking by minute ten and genuinely shocked by what 2-lb ankle weights can do. Sydney Cummings when I need someone to actually motivate me, the kind of trainer who makes you feel like you can do one more rep even when you absolutely do not want to. And Madelaine Rascan for strength training with a side of humor — no-nonsense, genuinely funny, built for real life.
All you need is a mat, some weights (or, honestly, water bottles), and a phone. That's it. The barrier to entry is basically nothing, which means the only thing standing between you and feeling stronger is pressing play.
Moving your body is cool. Building strength is even cooler.
Reality Check: Not Everything Is "Hard"
There's a quote from Cheryl Strayed — from her completely wonderful, life-changing book Tiny Beautiful Things — that I keep coming back to: "There is no why. You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding."
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, about how much the words you tell yourself actually matter. Not in a manifestation-girlie, vision-board way, but in the smaller, more stubborn sense of where you choose to put your attention. Spill your coffee at 8 a.m., decide the day is ruined, and it usually obliges. Tell yourself you're lucky, and you start noticing evidence of it everywhere.
I recently came across a video from Natalie Buchoz, a quadriplegic motivational speaker who became paralyzed at 15 after a skiing accident, talking about what it means to wake up every morning and choose your attitude. Not a platitude, coming from her. Just a straight-faced argument that "any problem with a solution isn't really a problem," and that most of us have more than we're giving ourselves credit for.
I've always been a positive person — my friends would probably say to a fault — but I used to wonder if that was just my personality, some genetic setting I lucked into. I don't think that anymore. Infertility, chronic illnesses, losing my best friend at 31: none of it was a gift, except that all of it gave me perspective I didn't know I needed and couldn't have gotten any other way. The hard cards didn't cost me my optimism. They're the reason I have it.
You don't get to choose the hand. But you do get to decide what you do with it.