New Year (STOP)

Week Three. Fifty to go.

Here’s 2026!

And how many more until the end of this execrable administration?? Too many for me to count before sinking into a morass of despair, that’s for sure.

It’s hard to imagine anything more obscene than the way our government leaders are handling the situation they have themselves created by sending their full stop paramilitary forces into Minneapolis. To what? To drag people out of their cars before they even have a chance to put on the brakes? This podcast episode really lays it out.

Literally who are these people? Who does this? Who is capable of this? Who is this damaged? This is terrifying to witness.

This poster I bought way back in Trump’s first term has never been more relevant.

Barely double digits into 2026, exhales turn into rage screams. I’m not sure what to add to the discourse over the murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis last week, but I do know what I saw - what we all saw. Another murder of an American citizen recorded and shown on loop. We must believe our eyes, no matter what heartless vile Commander Judy Vance tries to spit at us. And we must continue to talk about this. And say out loud what we saw: a woman was murdered by an I.C.E. officer.

To live under the rule of a President/Vice President combo who can’t summon a single word of compassion to the family of a woman who was murdered in plain sight, feels bewildering. It’s completely de-centering, and a tragedy, and a disgrace. Please, Sirs, never mention Jesus or your God again, he is not in your heart, everything you do and say contradicts what you claim to believe in. This is an affront to our humanity, it degrades us, it erodes our hope, and our humanity, and our belief that we are going to get through this in one piece.

The mood on the streets is *damp* and the color of the sky is *soggy World War One wool blanket.*

MEANWHILE, this fucking idiot.

Finally we can bring the boys home from the front!

In the meantime, I’ve sought solace in Marty Supreme’s addictive synth score to seek any and all motivation. I’m currently typing this post at the same cadence as elite table tennis, take my word for it. Speaking of small orange balls, the current tenant on Pennsylvania Ave also recently cut $10 billion in social services and child care in five democratically led states, but commandeering Venezuela and Greenland will improve Americans’ daily lives?.....

One bright spark of joy on the horizon this year is the continuation of my How To Survive Menopause tour. I once jokingly said that I hope this tour runs as long as perimenopause - 2 to 14 years - but I truly do! The way this show continues to evolve has fed my soul and purpose in a way I did not think possible.

In the initial ideation of this tour, I wanted perimenopausal women to feel seen and not alone in this wild, unpredictable biological progression. That remains true, but I also want women to feel free to hot flash, adapt, age, at whatever timeline works for THEM. This is no one else’s journey but your’s.

Relatedly, I was recently asked to contribute an essay for Jenna Bush-Hager’s Voices at the Table substack. (Definitely check out her page and the collection of different essays she has curated.) The prompt was “You’ve made a career out of saying the quiet part out loud. What’s one truth about women, power, and public life that we should stop whispering and start shouting?” Well, I let this question ping-pong in my brain for less than a nanosecond, before responding. Below is my re-post from Jenna’s page.

Everybody hold hands and say it with me: Banish Perfectionism.

Listen I know, I get it, it’s hard: there’s still a high strung Catholic school girl inside me who clamors for those shiny gold stars like it’s her job. But the older I get, the more this high strung 56 year old understands the futility of that quest. A lot of us just keep pushing that great big rock of perfectionism up that pointless hill, making lists just so we can cross things off, and churning out perfectly symmetrical holiday cookies, as if anyone is even checking. (Do I have a ruler that I *only* use for cookies? Possibly.)

I am worried that the pressure to be perfect is intensifying for people, especially as we age, and that often we whisper “we don’t need to be perfect” in the mirror, when we kind of don’t actually believe it.

It’s time to start shouting it from the rooftops.

For background, my passion in life these days is to marinate in the experience of middle age, and write and talk about it out loud to hordes of excitable women in sassy blazer combos around the country. This is my joy. This completes me in a way I never would have imagined. Decades of supplicating myself in the public sphere has given me the thick skinned audacity to look the indignities of middle age square in the eye and say “is that the best you can do?” No one else to please, only my deeply underserved audience of women clamoring to be seen, and not served milquetoast platitudes about mindful breathing to combat hot flashes. Oh PLEASE.

And the more I tour my show about menopause, the more my perspective grows. In real time I am observing the conversation around menopause and perimenopause evolve from “we never talk about this” to “finally we are talking about this” to now, “menopause, what menopause?”

OH NO, are we being perfectionists about menopause now too? Friends, I think we might be.

I am old enough to remember all the cultural conversation around women “Having It All,” and the perpetual debate over whether that is a worthy aspiration, or even possible at all. (It is not.) Well folks, if you look at the average social media feed of a woman over fifty today, this looks pastoral. We have crossed the rubicon. No one has time for any type of hand wringing over what enough might look like, or how to age with grace, or how to be perfectly imperfect. Now it seems, we are supposed to deny aging completely.

Not only are women Having It All, we are Having MORE at ALL TIMES. Having more sex, pounding heavier weights, guzzling protein, and in general, denying every natural truth in the universe. Thinner than you’ve ever been, kicking the barn doors in on midlife like the Kool Aid man, hotter at 56 than ever before imaginable.

It seems like the window in which we could have a reasonable, rational conversation around perimenopause and menopause has passed, and now my social media is just a scotch hose in the face of weighted vests, untested supplements, and deep plane facelifts with a not-so-subtle undercurrent of “if you are experiencing any menopause symptoms at this point, you ARE WEAK.” (I mean, in my feed there are also lots of videos of cats launching themselves into Christmas trees? So perhaps there is some balance to the universe.)

I am really reflecting about the impact of external influences on our lives, and how we internalize those messages, and what that means for us, particularly in perimenopause and beyond. I think of little Sam Bee as a teen, being told in subtle ways that she was imperfect/lacking/not quite right in all the teen style magazines and now, Sam Bee, middle aged woman, receiving that same messaging as a middle aged woman. The message is the same for women at 16 and 56, “whatever *it* is, you are doing it wrong.”

Dear God.

I am so tired. I am so tired of the message that I am doing it wrong. WE are not doing it wrong. We are doing it just fine. And so what I deeply want is for all of us to collectively stand up and yell into the universe “NO MORE. WE ARE DOING IT RIGHT, and stop telling us otherwise. WE ARE IMPERFECT, LET US LIVE.” I want to shout at the world and at each other that we are enough, just as we are.

I worry so much that we postpone real life happiness when we aspire too much; that we demonstrate to our kids a quest for perfection that will always leave them unsatisfied. Look into my eyes while I say this: the concept of perfection is just marketing, and we have the power to resist it.

Can we cut ourselves some slack? Can *I* cut *me* some slack? This is the real question.

Maybe I’ll make a list of all the ways I can be less of a perfectionist, and crossing things off it will be so so satisfying! I’ll make the first move: banishing my dedicated holiday cookie ruler to the donation pile. Now it’s your turn.

Since I missed the cut off for most Best of 2025 lists, here are a few recent favorites for entering 2026. (See what I did there? #branding)

• I have been flying through all the books. I’ve added them to my “Currently Reading” Bookshop list. With topics ranging from tuberculosis, market crashes, and dystopian futures - don’t read too much into my psyche. I also tore up several new cookbooks, featuring a few Choice Words guests (Alison Roman and Samin Nosrat.) Next up? VIGIL, by my all time favorite, George Saunders.

• I’ve been listening to Lily Allen’s West End Girl album for over two months, can’t stop, won’t stop. And you are correct; I do wish I had named How To Survive Menopause “Pussy Palace.” Missed. Opportunity.

• A few years ago I wrote an ode to Taylor Swift and my God do I stand by it. Her docuseries on Disney+, The End of an Era, was a great portrait on exploring the BTS (behind the singer) crew that contributed to one of the largest entertainment spectacles ever staged. Plus her verbal and $$$ recognition to all those that worked so hard to make that tour successful was a great example of leadership. Can she buy WarnerBros?

I’d also like to mention that there are 294 days until Election Day. ALL seats in the House of Representatives and 35 (out of 100) Senate seats are up for grabs. No sleep until midterms so start hydrating and stretching now.

See you all for week four, Good God.

Xoxo,

Sam