Honestly Kristin

Have you ever gotten the thing you'd been working toward — the job, the house, the degree — and waited for the feeling that was supposed to come with it? This episode is the mirror image of that. After almost ten years home with my kids, I tried to go back to work. I got one interview, and the only call I got was the one telling me no. I hung up, sat in my kitchen, and waited to be disappointed.

I was relieved. That's all. And I didn't tell anyone, because who calls a friend to say "I didn't get the job and I feel great about it"? In this episode I walk through the whole thing: the years of volunteer work that kept the door propped open, the old writing samples I dug out of my computer (including a launch plan from the mid-'90s I'm still a little proud of), the new bag, the office full of kids in jeans, and the interview where I could prove I'd be good at the job but couldn't explain why I wanted it.

Underneath it is the question nobody asked us when we were little. They asked what we wanted to be — meaning what title, what paycheck. Nobody asked how we wanted our lives to feel. My list said "get a good job," and I'd never asked whether that line was still mine. The relief knew before I did.

If you've gotten to the next step on your list and caught yourself wondering "what's next" — or not gotten there and can't explain why you aren't more upset — tell me about it. DM me on Instagram or send me a note through my website. No judgment here. You've heard my stories now.

Are you seeing as many weighted vests as I am? The dog walkers, the influencers doing dishes in them, the women on treadmills — and the TikTok accounts of women in weighted vests reviewing other women in weighted vests. I'm not buying one, and that's not a flex. It's the doorway into this episode: the whole parade of products being marched past midlife women right now, and the assumption underneath all of it.

I walk the wellness aisle of my own feed in this one. The vibration plates. The red light masks (Hannibal Lecter chic, at a serious price). The peptides in the mail. The 11-step skincare routine my face does not need. And the sleep tracker on my own finger — which I bought for real sleep issues, which tells me real things, and which also judges my Saturday night wine and once made me tired at nine a.m. on a morning I'd woken up feeling fine. When the data helps me notice something, it's doing its job. When it overrides what I already know about how I feel, the data is the boss, and that's a problem.

To be clear: I'm not telling you to stop using any of these products, and I'm not the person to tell you what's safe. Some of this might help. Some of it is a placebo in nicer packaging. What I am saying is this — early in my marketing career I learned that companies weren't creating products to solve problems, they were creating problems to sell products. And the assumption that women in midlife are malfunctioning machines in need of fixing is wrong. We are not broken.

There is a perfume in my Sephora cart, and I don't wear perfume. It has been there for months. I am never going to buy it, and I am never going to delete it, and this episode is about why.

I opened all my carts for this one — Nordstrom, Sephora, Ulta, Amazon — and read them for what they actually are. The black dress bought for a version of myself I was imagining, returned by the time I wasn't her anymore. The magnesium standing in for the rest I actually want, fourteen dollars at a time. The drawer dividers holding the door open to a calmer house that no bin is going to build. Because our search history is just questions. Our cart is who we think we are going to become.

A Pinterest board knows it is a dream. The cart thinks it actually has a chance. Nothing in it can fail, because nothing in it is tried. It is hope with the tag still on it — and I don't think that's shameful. I think it's information. My cart has been keeping a list of what I'm hoping for all along. I'd just been reading it as a list of products.

Play along at home if you want. Nobody else ever has to see yours. Then come tell me what's in your cart — I'm sure there are entire product niches that haven't found me yet.

Hi {{contact.first_name}},

Somewhere in your phone is a woman you used to talk to every day.

You didn't fight. There's no story, no betrayal. The kids aged out of the activity, or somebody moved, and the friendship that used to have a standing date for lunch just stopped having a date. I carried something like guilt about that for years — as if the right kind of woman keeps every friend forever.

This week's episode is about why that isn't failure. It's also about a box that showed up on my porch a few days after I shocked one of my oldest friends — second-grade oldest — with the news that I was getting divorced. What was inside said everything, and I'll show it to you in the episode.

And it's about the friend I met in folding chairs at a baseball field in my forties, who knew my marriage was in trouble before I said one word. There's a Friday night in this episode I won't give away here, except to say it involved beers to go, and it ended with her holding me up before anyone else knew the truth.

My kids watched Stranger Things and treated it like a documentary that needed fact-checking, because it turns out the '80s childhood I'd been describing was real: bikes across town lines for pizza, a cowbell instead of a phone, a dead car handled with a memorized number and a grandmother. This is the fun one. I'm confessing the whole case file, including the night I jumped off a slowly moving train to make curfew, a story my own mother is hearing for the first time on this episode. And then the uncomfortable turn, where the least-supervised generation in history grew up and put trackers on our kids and sat in the carpool line we swore we'd never join. I want to hear your "I will never" vow, and exactly how fast you folded.

Twenty minutes after my husband told me he wanted a divorce and didn't love me anymore, he told me he couldn't imagine not being friends. He'd had years to get to that sentence. I'd had twenty minutes. This is the friendship offer that shows up before you've even started grieving, and the reflex a lot of us have to say yes to it, to smooth it over, to make the worst news of our lives easier for the person delivering it. It's about how accommodating quietly stopped being generosity and became my job, and how differently the same behavior gets labeled depending on whether a man or a woman does it. Grief has an order. You get to take your time, and you don't have to apologize for it.

I'm in six group chats, but there's one that's been running for years, the mom chat that started as carpool logistics and quietly turned into a load-bearing wall. Here we go into the genres of texter we all recognize (the voice-memo oversharer, the emoji-only lurker, the all-caps woman with no actual emergency), and the morning one of us typed something heavy into it at five a.m. and went silent, and the rest of us just showed up. We treat the group chat like a joke. It isn't. It's one of the most important pieces of friendship infrastructure a woman has. If you've got a chat like that, this is your reminder to tell those women they matter. If you don't, you can start one today with two texts.

I drove my youngest son through two hours of Ohio cornfields to look at a college in the middle of nowhere, and on the ride home he finally got quiet and asked me the thing all that driving hadn't answered: how are you supposed to choose? I told him the truth. There isn't a perfect one. This is that drive, plus the school I chose wrong at eighteen and had to leave, and how you make a choice right by who you become after you show up, not by cracking some code beforehand. It's really about every big decision, and it's for the moms I keep meeting who are less worried about their kid's choice than about all the choices they made themselves, and what those mean now that the house is about to get quiet.

Menopause is finally having a moment. There are doctors on TikTok, actresses testifying to Congress, weighted vests everywhere, and more information about what's happening to women's bodies in their forties and fifties than our mothers ever got. And still, most of us are going through it alone. This one sits in the gap between all that content and the conversations we're not actually having: hormone replacement therapy and the study that scared a whole generation off it, the brain fog and the hot flashes and the rage nobody warned me about, and why we'll watch menopause videos for hours before we'll say one true thing out loud to a friend. Content isn't conversation. This week, find your person and send the text.

I've been rewriting the same five-word text to a friend for two days. This is what my brain does, and if you've ever lain awake at three in the morning relitigating a conversation from eight years ago, or talked yourself out of something good because your brain found seventeen reasons it would fail, you already know the feeling. So this one is about overthinking and anxiety and what it actually costs you, sometimes hours, sometimes years. I'll give you the reframe I use almost every day, and the harder truth underneath it: sometimes your anxiety is lying to you, and sometimes the quiet voice you keep dismissing is the smartest part of you. Learning to tell them apart is most of the work.