Kristyn Hodgdon
Everything you’re feeling, but didn’t know how to say.
So...Are Cigarettes Really Back?
Don't judge me, but my favorite trend on the internet right now is the whole notion that "cigarettes are back." Women aligning their chakras with a smoke and a cocktail, girls lighting up and simply not giving a f*ck, comment sections full of people saying how refreshing it is to see someone rebelling against the optimizing, just for a second.
Even Gwyneth Paltrow deadpanned on Good Hang with Amy Poehler that when she's 87, she's going to start smoking again — which, honestly, is the most relatable thing Gwyneth Paltrow has ever said.
But are cigarettes actually back? Not really. According to the CDC, only about 10% of U.S. adults currently smoke, down from over 40% in the 1960s, and women have been leading the charge to quit faster than anyone else. So no, we are not lighting up en masse. This is not a movement; it's a mood.
And I think I understand the mood.
Yes, we know cigarettes cause cancer. Yes, they impact fertility and accelerate aging and do approximately zero good things for the human body — nobody's arguing otherwise. But I think what's really happening here is a pressure-release valve, a collective, slightly unhinged exhale from women who are exhausted by the never-ending performance of being "well."
So when someone lights a cigarette on camera and looks genuinely unbothered, what people are responding to isn't the cigarette. It's the idea that you could just exist in your body for a hot minute without running a full diagnostic on it (which, if you've spent any time in the wellness space lately, honestly sounds like a vacation).
Nobody's actually advocating for smoking. But if the alternative is stressing yourself into a cortisol spiral trying to live forever, you start to wonder: would a martini really kill you? Probably not... and sometimes that's enough.
Ask Clara:
"Does vaping cause infertility?"
The Village Doesn't Build Itself
"Everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager." I keep seeing that on social media, and every time it stops me, probably because it's true in a way that's a little uncomfortable.
I grew up in a big Italian family, which means I didn't have to think about community — it just showed up (usually with food and opinions), whether you asked for it or not. Sunday dinners weren't optional, neither was knowing your cousins' business, and a goodbye that should have taken five minutes somehow always took forty-five. The village wasn't a concept; it was just Tuesday.
So when I put my kids in a new school this year, I understood what I was actually signing up for: not just carpool logistics and classroom emails, but the slower, less convenient work of becoming someone's people. Staying at the birthday party instead of running errands, making the conversation real instead of keeping it pleasant, saying yes to the panel on a weeknight when the couch is right there.
Last week, I moderated a Resolve event for National Infertility Awareness Week, and the room was full of people doing exactly that — showing up in person, which still feels like a small act of defiance these days, for a conversation that's heavy and vulnerable and not always easy to walk into. Some were just starting out, some were in the thick of it, and some were already on the other side and came anyway, for whoever happened to be sitting next to them. That's the villager.
The villager isn't the person with the most time or the most energy. It's the person who shows up anyway, says the true thing first, and makes it a little easier for everyone else to follow. Last week, in that room, there were a lot of them.
Ask Clara:
"How do I find my village as a mom?"
The New Way to Screen for Cervical Cancer (No Stirrups Required)
In February, I was lying on the exam table at my annual, underwear tucked under my jeans on the chair in that way that makes absolutely no sense, catching up with my very pregnant OB about life with three kids, while she was looking directly into my vagina. The multitasking alone deserves some kind of award.
I love my doctor, and I love that I have one, which is something I'm increasingly aware of — and exactly why this news felt worth paying attention to.
ACOG just updated its cervical cancer screening guidance to include self-collection for high-risk HPV testing, meaning women between 30 and 65 can now use a swab to collect their own vaginal sample (no stirrups, no speculum, no pelvic exam required). You don't even have to find your cervix. The sample gets sent to a lab, and results come back within a week or two. Teal Health has been doing this at-home version for a while now, and it's exactly the kind of option this moment is calling for.
Nearly half of U.S. counties don't have a single OB/GYN, which means for a lot of women, getting to a clinic at all isn't a given. Cervical cancer is one of the most preventable cancers we have, but it's still killing women, largely because screening requires access that not everyone has.
Self-collection doesn't fix the underlying problem, but it does mean that the woman who can't get an appointment, can't take a day off, or lives an hour from the nearest clinic has one fewer barrier between her and information that could save her life. The underwear-on-the-chair situation isn't going anywhere, but at least more women get a shot at the thing that actually matters.
Apparently, There's Only One Good Week Per Month
I still can't get over how often women with regular cycles get their periods. I'm apparently one of them now: after years of cycles that showed up whenever they felt like it, a predictable 33-day rotation remains genuinely shocking to me. And now that I'm actually living it month after month, I completely understand what people mean when they say there's maybe one good week where you actually feel like yourself. One. The rest is just managing.
The week before my period, my ADHD is louder, my patience is thinner, and I'm bloated in a way that makes me want to live in my husband's sweatpants. Nothing falls apart, nothing is catastrophic, everything is just slightly harder than it needs to be, and I have about 40% less tolerance for all of it.
So when I came across Sanctiva for Her, I was genuinely curious. It's a new, plant-based, drug-free option for period aches and emotional imbalance: gummies made with hemp-derived cannabinoids (CBD, CBG, and CBC) plus adaptogens and botanical extracts, designed to be absorbed quickly and work fast, with no THC and no drowsiness.
As someone who spent the entirety of my 20s not ovulating at all, I'm still adjusting to the reality that this is just monthly life now, which makes anything that promises real relief for the other three weeks very worth knowing about. For women 21+, you can find Sanctiva for Her at getsanctiva.com.
The Trip We Didn't Take
My husband and I were supposed to be in Portugal this week. Our friends were getting married, we had the tickets booked, and then his new job made it impossible to go. I have a lot of feelings about that (which I will not fully get into here), but I will say: it's been an emotional week.
I'm also in my luteal phase, which is doing absolutely nothing to help.
The harder part is that most of the people on that trip are in our lives because of Lisa, our friend who died almost six years ago at 31. She loved to travel more than anyone I've ever known. Going would have been bittersweet in the specific way only grief can pull off: the thing that hurts and feels right at exactly the same time.
Instead, we went upstate for the weekend, which, genuinely, was not bad. We ate well, hiked, drank good wine, and wandered into a little bookstore bar called The Spotty Dog, where I picked up a compilation of Joan Didion's writing and spent a very peaceful hour just reading.
But then this week arrived — wedding photos on my phone, answering emails I can barely focus on, full awareness that I am not in Portugal — and I keep coming back to the same thing: we should have gone. There will always be another work conflict. There will not always be that group of people, in that place, for that reason.
Didion said: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."
I think I already knew. I just needed to write it down.
Eight Weeks Is Not Enough (And Deloitte Knows It)
When I had my twins, my company gave me four and a half months of paid maternity leave, and I was so grateful I could have cried — which, given that I was postpartum and running on fumes, I probably did. Twin A came vaginally, Twin B was an emergency C-section, I hemorrhaged, and my mental health took a hit I wasn't prepared for. At eight weeks, when I was barely cleared for sex and exercise, the idea of returning to work full-time would have broken me. That leave wasn't a perk; it was the thing that kept me upright.
So when I saw that Deloitte is cutting paid parental leave in half — from 16 weeks to 8 for a segment of its workforce, alongside a $50,000 IVF reimbursement and days of PTO — my stomach dropped, not because I was surprised, but because I know what eight weeks postpartum actually looks like from the inside.
The part that should concern everyone: a former Google head of HR said this move "legitimizes the action for everybody else," meaning Deloitte isn't the ending of this story; it's the opening.
We talk constantly about what women need to show up fully — at home, at work, in their own bodies — and then watch companies quietly pull the rug out and call it a business decision. Eight weeks is not enough to recover from a birth, barely enough to figure out breastfeeding, and certainly not enough to return to a job that requires your full brain. I know because I lived it, and I was one of the lucky ones.
The Chin Hair Conversation I Didn't Know I Needed
This week, mid-facial, my esthetician asked if she could pluck my chin hairs. I said yes, obviously, and then we started talking about all of the things we have to do to maintain our appearance as women, which naturally led to hair loss, and she — who is Irish, which makes everything she says land harder — looked at me completely deadpan and said, "They're losing it on their head and gaining it on their chin."
I've never felt so seen in my life.
Because if you have PCOS, you know. The acne that shows up on your jaw like it's paying rent. The three hairs you find on your chin on a Tuesday for no reason. The question you're always running in the background: is this my pillowcase, my towels, my workout, or the hormonal disorder I'll be managing for the rest of my adult life?
Here's the short version of what's actually happening: PCOS drives up androgens (testosterone and related hormones), which can shrink hair follicles on your scalp while simultaneously encouraging them everywhere else. It's not random or your skincare routine; it's your endocrine system doing its thing, loudly, on your face.
I don't want to go back on birth control, I'm not ready to commit to spironolactone, and I've mostly made my peace with the fact that I will probably be plucking in the car for the foreseeable future — but I'm also starting to think laser hair removal wouldn't hurt.
SELF Magazine Is Closing, and I'm Not Over It
When I was maybe ten or eleven, before I knew I could write, I was convinced I was going to be a fashion designer. Or a makeup artist. The plan changed weekly. What didn't change was the ritual: cutting up magazine covers, doing my own makeup on the models with whatever drugstore eyeshadow I could get my hands on, and plastering them across my bedroom walls like I was curating something. SELF was always in that pile.
I found out last week that it's closing after 47 years, and I am genuinely sad.
Here's what I'm not sure anyone is saying: SELF wasn't just a health magazine. Growing up, surrounded by Allure and Glamour and Cosmo and Teen Vogue (RIP to another legend) — all those glossy, aspirational universes telling us to be smaller and prettier and more palatable — SELF was always just there. Telling us to get stronger, to understand what was happening in our own bodies, to actually show up for our own care. It was a different message. And for a lot of us, it helped quietly undo what we'd been absorbing for years, which was, mostly, that our bodies were problems to manage.
As someone who once dreamed of working within the walls of Condé Nast, this stings. As a founder who has spent years trying to do something similar — make women's health feel less confusing, less clinical, more like something that actually belongs to you — it feels like a small defeat.
Every outlet that takes women's health seriously makes that work a little more possible. Every one that closes makes it a little lonelier, and a little more urgent.
National Infertility Awareness Week: Three Kids, Eight Years, and a Lot of Feelings
It's National Infertility Awareness Week, which means I've been thinking a lot about the version of me who sat in a fertility clinic waiting room at 28 — college-educated, completely blindsided — and learned for the first time that you actually have to ovulate to get pregnant. I wish that were a joke. It is not even a little bit a joke.
That appointment eventually led to a PCOS diagnosis, a string of failed IUIs, and a path to IVF that took longer and hurt more than I'd let myself imagine. My twins arrived after all of it, but a high-risk pregnancy made sure I never quite exhaled: at 27 weeks, my cervix shortened overnight, and what had been a regular Tuesday turned into hospital bed rest and breath I held for weeks.
My third was a different kind of hard: two miscarriages, several failed transfers, and one last cycle where we'd already talked through what "done" would look like if it didn't work. He just turned sixteen months, which still feels a little impossible to say out loud.
I share all of this because 1 in 6 people will experience infertility in their lifetime, and most of them will do it in waiting rooms and two-week waits and late-night searches that never quite say the thing they actually need to hear. The information exists, but the community, the language, the permission to fall apart and still keep going? That part is harder to find.
That's the whole reason Rescripted exists, and my inbox is always open.
Zoom Dysmorphia Is Real, and I Have It Bad
Are we looking at ourselves too much? No, like, that's a serious question.
Maybe it's the fact that I'm in my "late" 30s now. Maybe it's four hours of Zoom meetings a day. Maybe it's both. But I genuinely did not care this much about my hairline — or my eleven line, for that matter — before the pandemic and, let's be honest, social media.
Because before we even get the crust out of our eyes in the morning, we're already watching seventeen videos of creators who are simply glowing. Do they have a filter on? Probably. Does that make us any less self-conscious? Absolutely not.
And the numbers back it up: cosmetic procedures in the U.S. have grown 19% since 2019, with liposuction, breast augmentation, and tummy tucks leading surgical procedures, and Botox and fillers dominating the non-surgical side. And then there's the TikTok rabbit hole of botched procedures: people dissolving filler, reversing lip jobs, genuinely grieving the face they had before. Jessi from Secret Lives of Mormon Wives comes to mind. It's a lot.
I think about my daughter watching me look at myself on a screen and wondering what I'm looking for. I don't know what the moral of the story is here, but I will say this: you're perfect the way you are, and maybe we all just need to go touch some grass — not for our nasolabial folds, but for all the girls who came after us.
Ask Clara:
"What is body dysmorphia, exactly?"