Life has been asking something big of me for the past several months and these past few weeks have intensified even more. Some admittedly agonizing things are unfolding in my family right now that need my full presence, and my mom needs me in a way that has to come first.

What’s legitimately unbelievable is that there’s suddenly more weight stacked on top of that too. We have just learned of a separate, serious health situation with someone else very, very close to me. Almost unimaginable timing. Together it adds up to the kind of season that requires me to disappear for a while.

I’m stepping off all social platforms until it feels right to come back. Probably just a week or two. Hundreds of you invest in me here as paid subscribers, so I ask wholeheartedly for your patience.

How am I feeling? A little numb. Scared. Wishing I had a magic wand. Some of it is truly torturous. But, while it’s a genuinely painful time right now, I know I was built for the job that needs to be done, and I’m taking great comfort in that. I am feeling useful and I feel God working through me every step of the way.

And now a quick favor.

If you’re the praying kind, I’d be so grateful to have my family held in your prayers.

If prayer isn’t your language, could you send us some white light, energetic healing, whatever strength you have to spare?

Asking for help has never come easy to me. Consider this me practicing.

Thank you for being here and for letting me be human with you. I read your kind, encouraging messages, and they truly have been getting me through.

With all of my love and gratitude,

Catt

Leave a comment

Same date. Same quiet cocktail of reflection and gratitude I wrote about last year. But almost everything else? Different.

A year ago, I wrote my very first piece here. I opened this space with only a handful of days of sobriety behind me and no real idea what any of this would become. I just knew I needed somewhere to begin again.

So I did. And then came the part I could never have scripted: you began again with me.

This has been, without exaggeration, one of the most transformative years of my life. I’ve stayed alcohol-free — a little over a year now, and counting. I’ve loved and grieved and mothered and step-mothered. I’ve sat with my mother through hard days. I’ve kept renovating this ranch, and myself right along with it. I said YES to forever with my best friend and lover.

I’ve written my way through nearly all of it. Right here, with you reading over my shoulder.

Something quieter happened this year, too. I went looking. Really looking. I tuned into nature in a way I never had before. I got honest about my own energy, my interior life, the spiritual depths I’d always sensed but never sat still long enough to explore. And I was stunned by what opened up.

None of it happened alone. It happened because of the people who found their way into my world this year. Like-minded new friends, and circles of women who held space for me to be vulnerable enough to finally come home to myself. Wise teachers and mentors and guides gave me more than they’ll ever know. I am indebted to every one of them — because everything they poured into me is exactly what I get to turn around and share with you.

And what I did not expect is how much you would give back.

Share

The women

I have met, and truly connected with, more women this year than I can count. You’ve filled my inbox, my comments, my whole heart. You’ve written to tell me that something I posted landed at the exact moment you needed it — and every single time, it lands right back on me.

Some of you told me my words were the invitation you’d been quietly waiting for to begin your own alcohol-free journey.

Some of you wrote to say you finally believe you can find love again at midlife — that it isn’t too late, that the door is not closed.

Some of you are deep in the ache of caring for an aging parent, and you found, in my story, the strange comfort of being understood.

And so many of you simply decided — in the middle of your one wild life — that reinvention was still yours for the taking. That you could step into your power and become the fullest version of yourself.

That is the whole reason I do this. Not the metrics. You.

And while we’re being honest

I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge how many of you found me in the first place. A lot of you came through the door I cracked open about my facelift — the honest, unfiltered, maybe-more-than-you-expected truth of it. I have zero regrets. Not about the procedure, and not about telling you the reality of it, stitches and swelling and all. If my openness gave you genuine information, or simply the comfort of hearing a woman say it out loud without shame, then it was worth every vulnerable word.

Wander back with me

If you’re newer here, or you just want to walk back through the year, here are a few of the pieces you returned to again and again.

• Now That the Booze is Gone

• I Said Yes at 51

• Mom & Me

• My Facelift

• Here’s What Reinvention Actually Looks Like

• The Harder Parts of Healing: Are You Hiding?

• The How: Letting Go of Alcohol and Coming Home to Yourself

A substantial place

When I named this space SUBSTANTIAL, it was partly aspiration — a word I wanted to reflect the very life I was interested in living. One of meaning. A year later, I think we’ve done it. Look how far we’ve come. Look at what we’ve built here, together: something honest, something warm, something real. A substantial place, in every sense of the word.

If it’s meant something to you this year — if it met you at the right moment even once — I’d be so honored to have you here as a paid subscriber. On this birthday of ours, it’s the most meaningful way to say keep going. Paid subscribers get the extra essays, the deeper cuts, the more intimate corners of what I’m building. The mini CATTE podcasts. But mostly, you help keep the lights on in a room we made together.

Before I go

A year ago, I left you with a question: if you were to begin again this week, what would you want to rewrite or reboot?

So here’s what I want to know now, twelve months later: What did you begin? And who are you becoming?

Because I hope that this year changed you, too. That you’re a little freer. A little more awake. A little more yourself. I hope you’re becoming your own best version, right alongside me.

Happy birthday to me.

Happy anniversary to us.

Thank you for a year I will never forget.

Here’s to beginning again and again, and again.

With so much love,

Catt

Leave a comment

What do you do when you’re needed to show up in such real ways for others? You take better care of yourself.

Easier said than done.

Having said that, wellness is a critically important pillar of my life, as proven by the row of amber bottles on my bathroom counter that I am currently staring at. I could tell you what every single one is for. The one for sleep that mostly works. The powder I stir into water for energy that I pretend to enjoy. The list is endless. Creatine. Collagen. Omegas. DHEA. How do I age well, age strong, and age armed with all of the things that support my longevity?

Basically, I have become the manager of my own body these days. And knowing a lot of you, my readers, and the women who follow me and the questions they DM me, I know I’m not alone.

If you’re in the sandwich generation then you’re all too familiar with the never-ending task to manage. Everyone else first, and then yourself, from whatever is left.

This fall I’m doing something different.

Share

For four days in September, I’m heading to CIVANA Wellness Resort & Spa, out in the Sonoran Desert, for a women’s health summit built around exactly the things I care deeply about. Eight physicians from Mayo Clinic. Not on a stage, not gone after the keynote. In the room. At the meals. There for the whole thing.

And here is what I want from it.

I want to be a student for once, instead of the manager. I want to sit in a room where nobody lowers their voice to say the word libido. Where brain fog is a topic and not a confession. Where I can ask about sleep and hormones and the strange grief of a body that keeps changing the rules, and the answer comes from someone who actually knows.

I want to move. Not to burn anything off. To learn what my body is for now, at this age, in this chapter. To do the strength work and understand why it matters while it still feels like a choice and not a rescue.

I want to leave with a plan. A real one. Three things I do every day, not thirty I feel guilty about. A single page I could hand my future self.

I’ve always been a seeker. I read the charts. I do the breath work. I chase the download and the full moon and the quiet voice that says pay attention. This is that same impulse, pointed at the evidence.

Science and soul in the same room. I don’t think they were ever meant to be strangers.

And the timing. I turn fifty-two right before this trip. Not a milestone number, nothing round about it, which is maybe the point. I’m not waiting for a birthday with a zero on the end to take my own body seriously. I’ll do it regardless of the calendar, in the desert, asking better questions, deciding on purpose how I want to feel walking into the rest of my beautiful, messy life.

If your body has started asking you new questions too, come with me.

Civana’s Women’s Health Summit. September 17 through 20. Bring a sister, a friend, or just yourself.

Register HERE.

See you soon in downward dog!

With love from the ranch,

Catt

Leave a comment

It’s the zero-proof one. Non-alcoholic. The gentle ghost of the beer that kept me company through most of my adult life.

Anyone who has known me for more than five minutes knows that it used to be my go-to. A kind of companion. It sat beside me on the sun-drenched, laughing, luminous days, the ones I would call the best of my life. And it sat with me just as faithfully through the days that wrecked me. The breakups, the funerals, and the quiet collapses. Or, honestly, just an ordinary Sunday afternoon. The same bottle, every single time. It knew all of me.

Today, it’s the NA, zero version. And today, I am one year alcohol free.

I’m writing this from my mother’s home, looking out at the Pacific. If I’m honest, I had imagined something bigger for this day. A thoughtfully crafted video, maybe. An emotional IG reel. Something more intimate, where you could see my face and hear my voice. And I wanted that, not because I need to be congratulated for reaching a number on a calendar, but because there is something I ache for you to know:

I am living proof that a life can change. That a person can change, all the way down to the root. And that change can be for the better. Tender and hard-won and very, very real.

I also know this. When you finally learn how to show up for yourself, something pretty miraculous begins to happen. You become able to show up for the people you love in an entirely new way. More fully. More completely. More wholly, you.

I know this in my bones right now, because it is exactly what is being asked of me, and it is asking for everything I have.

For the last several months I have been grieving the slow loss of the mother I used to know. Every day I lose a little more of her and that’s not an exaggeration. There is no cure for her disease, no version of this where I get to fix it, and the ache of it reaches all the way back into my childhood (stories for my memoir in the making).

But here’s the irony I can’t get over. This last month, the final stretch of my first sober year, has been the hardest of all of it.

The rest of the year was, mostly, light lifting. I mean the first thirty, sixty days were slightly boring and somewhat flat, full of mocktail experiments and figuring out who I was at a party without a fancy glass in my hand. But I only white-knuckled it a few times that I can recall. I barely craved it. I know that’s rare but I guess I wanted to come back to the truest version of myself so badly that willpower never really entered the room. It wasn’t discipline. It was a choice, made over and over, to come home to the girl I was before the world taught me to cope by shoving my feelings aside. I wanted to return to the girl who didn’t carry shame.

And then, the last few weeks arrived and put me inside a storm.

I won’t reveal all of it but I will tell you that I have wanted, more than once, to leave my own body. To escape. To not feel this. And the old me, I know exactly how she would have done it.

If I were still drinking, this pain would not be smaller. It would be exponentially worse. I would be witnessing my mother’s declining health and drowning myself on top of it, which is a math I have run before and lost.

What this season is asking of me requires every ounce of who I am. My strength, my steadiness, my sharpness, my full and undivided presence. She needs me. And she needs the version of me that only this year could have built.

People love to roll their eyes at all the self-improvement wellness work. The growth talk. The healing. “Too self-absorbed,” I hear people sometimes say.

I don’t believe that. I don’t subscribe to that. Doing “the work” on yourself is the least selfish thing there is. The whole point, the entire return on all of that private, unglamorous effort, is that you get to hand the people you love a better version of you. You stop phoning it in. You show up for your family, your kids, your person, the ones who need you, as someone actually fully available to be there.

So here I am. Heart in pieces, genuinely sad and scared, the future about as uncertain as it gets. And still I can tell you, without a flicker of doubt, that I made the right choice. A beautiful one. A powerful one. I healed parts of my body and parts of my heart, and I am not the woman I used to be.

Let me tell you about her.

One year ago today, that woman was walking across a parking lot at noon on a Monday, headed into a liquor store for a six-pack of Blue Moon. Yep, noon. Monday.

They didn’t have it.

The man behind the counter suggested I go next door to the Publix. That was all he did. One ordinary redirection from one stranger.

But in the gap between his store and the other one, something reached me. Not a thought. A message, landing from somewhere deeper and higher than my own mind. God. My higher self. The oldest, truest part of me. Call it whatever you want. It told me, plainly, that I was better than this.

I stopped in the middle of that parking lot.

Share

The six-pack I came for wasn’t there. A stranger pointed me one way, and then something far wiser pointed me another. And that was it. I made a decision, standing on the asphalt that day in that very moment.

I never made it to Publix.

And here we are one year later, on my mother’s deck with the ocean in front of me and a Blue Moon in my hand. The zero kind. Same beer, sorta. Completely different woman.

So now let me ask you. Are you tired? Tired of the negotiation that never ends. Do I drink tonight, or don’t I? How much is too much? Is it fine if it’s only weekends, only after the kind of day that seems to earn it, only when everyone else has a glass in their hand?

That quiet, constant calculation running in the back of your mind. I know it intimately. I ran it for years, and it takes so much more than it ever gives back.

Here is what I have come to believe. The negotiation is not where your answer lives. Your answer is the voice underneath all of that noise. The very same one that found me in a parking lot at noon on a Monday. She is in you too. She is softer than the bargaining, and steadier, and she is telling you the truth. That you are better than this. That you were made for so much more. You do not have to wait for some dramatic, cinematic bottom before you are allowed to listen to her.

If any part of you is ready to set that chatter down, I made something for you. The How. It is yours the moment you want it.

Read The How

I refuse to undersell what’s on the other side of your decision if you too decide to take a break from alcohol. You get lighter. Clearer. More awake to your own life. You become a kind of magnet, a brighter frequency, a higher vibration, quietly drawing in the people and the mornings and the moments you have been longing for all along. It is real. It is available to you. And it is pretty fucking extraordinary.

Come and find out who you are without it. I will be right here, cheering you on the whole way.

With love from Mom’s house,

Catt

Leave a comment

I was driving my mother to dinner, early, just after five o’clock, and somewhere along those familiar roads a wave of anxiety came over me that I couldn’t explain. Nothing had happened. She was fine in the seat beside me. Better than fine. And still something rose up in my chest, some old and unnamed thing, as we passed the corners and intersections of a city where I spent the years that decided the rest of my life.

I was a girl here once. At the end of college, at the very beginning of everything, standing in this city with no idea what I would do or who I would become. That girl felt very close tonight and very far away. I have lived a whole life she couldn’t have imagined. And there I was, driving her mother to a steakhouse, unable to tell you why there was a weighty kind of agony looming.

I should tell you that the day before was a tough one.

I flew across the country to be near my beautiful mother and walked into her house to find her struggling. Extremely disoriented. Rapid breathing. Very low blood pressure. It was frightening. My brother and I called an ambulance.

Read more

Thank you for questioning, caring, and understanding.

Some of you have been asking about Rufus. Over the last several months, many of you fell in love with him like we did. Ahhh. Goofy, energetic, beautiful Rufus.

Our sweetest boy is living in Washington now, with his own big brother from an earlier litter, folded into a canine community with more room and more hands than we could give him.

Here’s how we got there.

I’ve had dogs my whole life. I know what a puppy asks of you, and Greg and I said yes to all of it with our eyes open. The work was never the surprise. The timing was. Rufus came in hot right as my mother’s health started to slip, right as I understood, really understood, that she’d need more of me. Not once in a while. Often.

You followed his unlucky first year. The tonsil procedure. The foxtails he swallowed like snacks. The multiple vet visits. The pneumonia. The hospital stay. The incessant skin allergies. The list went on. That dog fought hard for a puppy. It was one crisis after another.

Between the ranch, four of our six kids living at home, and a mother I now fly to without much warning, something had to give. I couldn’t be everywhere at once. I couldn’t be enough in all the places that needed me. And our working dog Rufus deserved someone who could be.

When we told his breeder where we were at with everything, how we were struggling, she didn’t flinch. She sprang into action. His older brother from a previous litter was in Washington, she said, and that family would gleefully absorb him into their canine community. Dogs, land, time. All of it.

Share

It was a decision that didn’t come lightly, and trust me, it was an agonizing goodbye. The kind that is right but still guts you. We miss him every day, but luckily we get updates, pictures, and proof that he’s thriving.

It was my supreme honor to be Rufus’ human mom for those seven months. But you can’t always see what’s coming. I’m needed in a new way now. A different way. One that, if I’m honest, has no timeline I can name.

The judgment will come, I imagine, but that’s the trade when you share your life out loud. I’ll still be over here loving animals the way I always have. That love is part of why I made this call. Rufus deserved more than what was left of me during what has become a genuinely hard season in my life.

But you asked about Rufus. And now you know.

All of my love,

Catt

Leave a comment

See, I wrote you a letter on the way out here. I never sent it.

There was no wifi on the plane, and then I landed and the days closed over my head the way they do when you go home for something that matters. That letter was all about getting ready. About how I prepare now before I walk into something hard. I had it all figured out, sitting at thirty thousand feet, calm and prepared and full of love and good intentions.

Then I lived the four days. And I’d rather tell you what actually held.

I was home as a daughter and a sister. There for something worth celebrating, and home for the quieter, harder things underneath it. There is a complicated truth to my personal life these days but the stories aren’t only mine to tell. So forgive my ambiguity for now.

I now know this: A room can hold a cake and a heartbreak on the same afternoon. If you’ve lived long enough, you probably know life can be like that.

We spent the days at my brother and his wife’s beautiful cottage on Lamb Lake, tucked down in the southern part of the state on acres and acres of green. Sycamores and hickory trees. Still water. The kind of quiet that makes you notice how loud your regular life has been. That forest gave us somewhere soft to have the hard conversations, and somewhere beautiful to sit inside the ache of the things I can’t put here yet.

Mostly it was slow. Long mornings, longer tables. My siblings and my mother and me in similar rooms that we’ve always been in, just older now, carrying more. Our stepdad Jim was turning eighty. It was a joy to make a fuss over him the way you should when someone you love turns eighty. The rest of it was unhurried and close, and that was the gift, because it let me actually be there for it. The sweetness and the grief both.

So here’s what worked.

Subscribe now

The meditations held. They’re from Spirit Daughter, on her app Moment. The one thing her guided meditations teach me is that I can tell my own body it’s safe even when things feel confusing or uncertain. They are what I turned to most prior to my trip and a few times while I was there. These allow me to meet the day already steady instead of chasing calm all afternoon.

The walks held. I took the long way through the days every single time, even when I was tired, especially when I was tired. Nature asks nothing of you. After consecutive days of mental and physical heaviness, that was its own kind of medicine.

And yes, the little arsenal held too. A Relax Good Patch is boring in the best way. You stick it on your wrist and it works to relieve stress for up to twelve hours. (The calming core is ashwagandha, passionflower, and rhodiola. It also carries L-theanine, GABA, ginger root, black pepper extract, CoQ10, magnesium, and B vitamins.)

Alice Mushrooms - functional mushroom dark chocolate squares - went in my carry on. I reached for them a few times.

A mixed berry calming powder was mixed into my water one night.

None of it is a miracle. All of it was just a way of staying in my body instead of leaving it, which is the only thing I ever really wanted for many years from an alcoholic drink and never once got. (If you’re new here I’m almost one year sober.) This new, healthier approach to coping is leading the charge on my healing journey.

That’s the part I keep circling, somewhere over the middle of the country, watching Indiana go small behind me.

The old me would have managed this return trip home sprinkled with worry and difficult circumstances with something that numbed them. Blue Moons used to be the go-to. A homemade spicy margarita was a close second. I’d have come back to California foggy, behind, a little ashamed. This time I came home tired, but clear. Present for the hard parts and the sweet ones both.

Greg was beside me through all of it, the way he is. I felt loved. I felt steady. And I felt more grateful than I know how to say that I get to move through a season like this one, a season that is testing me in ways I won’t pretend it isn’t, as the woman I am now instead of the one I used to be.

Because that’s the thing I keep landing on. Tending to myself like this was never about willpower. It was love. And the love doesn’t stop at me. When I’m steady, there’s more of me for the people who need me. My mother. My siblings. The man next to me on this flight. The version of me they get now is softer and stronger than the one who used to white-knuckle through and call it coping. I’m proud of her. I don’t say that about myself very often. This time I mean it.

The seatbelt sign is off. We’ll be descending soon.

Share

Whatever your difficult days look like, the visit, the conversation you couldn’t avoid, the stretch that asks everything of you, I can tell you the tools you tend to yourself with beforehand are the same ones that carry you through. Not perfectly. But enough. Enough to stay awake for your own life, even the hardest parts of it. This is where the practice comes into play and when it works, it feels like a quiet win.

I’m almost home. I’m bringing all of myself back with me.

With love from the ranch,

Catt

Leave a comment

I am drinking a Diet Coke.

And here is what a year ago I may not have believed. I have no interest in disappearing anymore. I want to stay.

Even though a few minutes ago I got up and left Greg and his kids at the gate. His four children, who are becoming, slowly and without any guarantee, mine to love. I made sure everyone had their tickets, helped steer everyone through security, guided us to our departure location, and knew I needed a moment. I said I’d be back. I walked to this bar by myself and sat down in the noise.

A year ago that walk would have been an escape. It would have ended with something amber in a glass and a softness spreading through my chest that I mistook for peace. Tonight it is a Diet Coke and ten minutes of my own company, and I know the difference now. I know what my nervous system is asking for before it has to raise its voice. I know how to give her that. I know how to take care of her, because I finally learned what she needs.

I have always loved airports.

Most people don’t. They arrive braced, claustrophobic, already annoyed. But I love the aliveness of a place where no one is asleep. Everyone here is awake in a way we rarely let ourselves be. Everyone is going toward something they can picture and something they can’t. A reunion. A funeral. A first day. A last chance.

What’s wild is that we hand ourselves over to a vessel we did not build and cannot fly, and we trust, with no evidence, that it will carry us to the other side of the sky.

I find that somewhat crazy but also beautiful. All of us in motion. All of us trusting. All of us going somewhere we have not yet been.

Subscribe now

It’s this time of year again. The trees go heavy and the light turns gold in the late afternoon and somewhere overhead a door opens that the ancient Egyptians tracked and the mystics still honor. The Lionsgate portal. A window, they say, for calling in the version of yourself you were built to become. For dissolving the parts that no longer serve the person you are trying to be.

You see, it was almost exactly a year ago when I sat down inside that window and asked myself a question I had been avoiding for a very long time: What is the block? What is the thing standing between me and the life I can feel but cannot reach?

I journaled for two weeks. Heavy, and hard, and clarifying. And at the bottom of all of it was an answer I always knew was there but hadn’t been ready to resolve. It was the drink. It had been the drink for a while.

The thing I reached for to celebrate and to grieve and to soften every edge of every day was the exact thing standing in the doorway of my own becoming.

Letting it go was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I’d love to tell you it felt like freedom. Mostly, at first, it felt like loss. Like grieving a friend who had also been quietly robbing me for years.

But something in the stars, or in my energy, or in whatever it is that conspires on our behalf when we finally get honest, held the door open long enough for me to walk through it. The year anniversary is close enough now to touch.

Even then, in the worst of it, the question I kept asking was not only about me. It never has been. It was: what do I do with this once I have it?

There is a ring on my finger now.

If you missed it the proposal happened last month in Mexico, and when I said yes I meant it. A full body ‘this is my person, here is my partner’ YES.

But there’s a certain kind of arithmetic that comes after the yes.

Because here is the truth about being chosen at midlife. You are not only choosing him. You are choosing everyone he loves. Most of you know I raised my own two children already. I gave them the long years, the ordinary hours, the whole of my twenties, thirties and forties. In many ways, I anticipated a chapter that was finally going to be mine.

Instead, I am navigating the love I have for four people who did not come from me, and hoping, in the quiet way you hope for something you cannot control, that they are learning to love me back the same.

I will tell you what no one tells you, or what they tell you and you don’t understand until you are standing in it. It is a lot. Not in a way I resent at all. In a way that is honest. Loving this many people takes an exorbitant amount of energy, and at this point in my life that energy is not infinite, and so it has become a negotiation. Every single day I decide again how much of myself to give.

Some days I am all in. I have more than enough and I pour it out and it feels like the truest thing I have ever done.

And some days I sit at a bar by myself and wonder if it is selfish to want to give less.

Read more

While I was setting up, I picked up a leather journal my mom gave me in December of 2019. I wrote in it from 2020 to 2021, through a torturous breakup, a pandemic, parenting two teenage boys, and feeling the absolute lowest I have ever been. In this CATTE episode I read a few of those journal entries out loud for the first time.

I’m not sharing them because they’re pretty.

I’m sharing them because I’m proof that you can get out.

CATTE is usually for paid subscribers. This one is for everyone.

A few weeks ago a woman I’d just met at dinner asked, in total earnest, if I was in the wellness industry. I laughed. And then I thought about it. And then I claimed it right there over the entrées. Yes. I am.

I’ve been on a quest to feel good in my body for years now. The interior spiritual and emotional work was a huge piece of the puzzle. The many other variables that I believe got me to the age of ‘34’, I mentioned in my last essay.

It’s been eleven months since I’ve consumed alcohol.

But the rest? 100% for sale. Products. I cannot hand you a spreadsheet proving which capsule did what. Some of this came into rotation this very summer and I genuinely cannot tell you where the supplements end and the life begins.

But here’s what I do know. I haven’t been sick in about a year. Not once. I have more energy at 51 than I did at 45. And I feel good in my body, which is a wilder and better thing than looking good in a mirror. So take what calls to you and leave the rest.

And since you’re here on my Substack, a reminder about what SUBSTANTIAL means in this context. Beauty from the inside out, quite literally. The whole industry is finally catching up to the idea that the real work is regenerative, cellular, below the surface. Not lifespan, but healthspan. Not more years in the mirror, but more good years in the body. That’s the shelf I’m building. That’s the life I’m trying to curate, for me and for you.

Read more

I mean that literally. This was A-List Aesthetics, the inaugural event from The Hollywood Reporter, and the room was a who’s who of the people responsible for how Hollywood looks. The best plastic surgeons in the world. Scientists. Estheticians. Injectors whose names get whispered at dinner parties like state secrets. Grapefruit juice being poured. Quiche disappearing off china. Colorful summer flowers on every table, and above them, face after face looking exactly how you’d imagine. Refreshed. Healthy. Suspiciously well rested.

I was there to moderate one of the event’s panels. Which makes sense, if you know my story. Three years ago I became one of the first public figures to talk openly about getting a facelift, and I have spent a good portion of my public life since then in conversation with this exact world. The world of tweaks and tucks. The world of turning back the clock with very steady hands.

So I know this room. I’ve been its headline.

And I’ll tell you what surprised me most that morning. The conversation on that stage wasn’t exclusively about the surface anymore. The buzz in aesthetics right now is regenerative. Less filler pushing volume into faces, more biostimulators and PRP and stem cell science designed to get your own cells to do the work, rebuilding your own collagen from the inside. Many of the most sophisticated minds in beauty have landed on a radical idea: the body, given the right signal, can renew itself.

Which I found both fascinating and quietly funny. Because that is exactly the conclusion I’d come to about everything else.

The clock I’m proudest of turning back was not the result of a scalpel. But the principle? The principle we now share.

A few weeks earlier, Greg and I went to dinner with some friends of his, another couple I’d never met before. We sat down and at some point between the entrées, the conversation drifted to health. Injuries. Recovery. Our respective morning routines. I started talking about collagen, what it actually does, why I take it, how long it takes to feel a difference. And I suppose rather unexpectedly, my new friend asked me:

“Are you in the wellness industry?”

I laughed. Because no. I’m not a nutritionist. I’m not a dietician. I’m not a fitness guru with a certification and a program to sell you.

And also: yes. Obviously, embarrassingly, yes.

I’m a journalist by trade. But somewhere in the last several years, without ever announcing it, I turned the reporting instinct on my own body. Perimenopause will do that to you. Menopause will finish the job. I became a woman navigating hormones and fatigue and sleep that wouldn’t come and energy that wouldn’t stay, and I did what journalists do. I investigated. I ran the experiments on myself and reported back.

Do you want to know what the investigation looks like now? Because it is, and I say this with love, a full-time job.

There are the Urolithin A gummies. The colostrum powders. The omega-3s I take every day. The red light therapy. The Peak Cognition pills. The testosterone cream I rub on my thigh. The estradiol patch I rotate twice a week. The progesterone before bed. Somewhere in my bathroom there is a shelf that looks less like skincare and more like a small, well-run pharmacy, and I am its only patient.

So yes. I claimed the title right there at the table. I am in the wellness industry. The industry of one. The longest-running story I’ve ever covered.

But it’s only fair I have to report the failures too. This has been an experiment in the truest sense, which means some of it has blown up in the lab.

I learned the hard way that you cannot stack a sleep gummy on top of progesterone. The progesterone already works on GABA, the calming neurotransmitter. It is, functionally, a sedative. I assumed adding a gummy would mean sleeping twice as deeply. Instead I lay there wide awake, tossing and turning until sunrise, betrayed by my own protocol.

I have been trying to take my Sermorelin peptide injection five nights a week for three months now. I have not managed a single full week. Not one. Who can possibly remember all of these things? It’s maddening.

And yes, I bought the weighted vest like everybody else. I have used it three times. Let’s be honest. It’s annoying.

No one is perfectly optimized. Not even the woman with the pharmacy shelf.

Subscribe now

Which brings me to the number.

Three years ago, I wanted more than a feeling. I wanted data. So I enlisted Lifeforce, a medical concierge platform that draws your blood, measures dozens of biomarkers, and tells you what is actually happening inside your body in all its complexity. Not how you look. How you’re aging. There’s a difference, and it turns out the difference is the whole point.

When I started with them, my biological age came back three years younger than my actual age. Respectable. Encouraging. A nice pat on the head.

This year, the results came back with a new number.

Thirty-four.

I am a 51-year-old woman. I will not pretend to be casual about this. First came the facelift. Now this. Apparently, I am fully in my Benjamin Button era, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to print the number on a t-shirt. (The receipts are below. I’m including them because I would want to see them too.)

Now, some honesty about how this number gets made, because the biological age isn’t bloodwork alone. The biomarkers are the backbone, but the score also draws from a quality-of-life assessment. Questions about your lifestyle. Your relationships. Your exercise, your diet, your happiness. And it’s genuinely hard to isolate which supplement is doing what over three years of tinkering. I can’t hand you a spreadsheet proving the DHEA earned its keep.

But look at what that methodology actually means. The number measures your blood and your life. Both moved. And I know exactly which one moved more.

But before you roll your eyes, let me tell you the part that keeps this super real.

The same bloodwork that said 34 also said my cholesterol needed help. Real help. I resisted a statin for a year. A full year. I tried Ezetimibe first, a prescription pill that was offered as a first attempt to lower those levels, and it simply didn’t work to the degree it needed to. My Lifeforce clinician finally looked at my numbers, and my family history, and told me plainly: if she were me, she would start the statin.

So I did.

A woman with a biological age of 34 who also just started a statin. Both things are true. That is what real health looks like at midlife. Not a flex. An honest accounting. The victory and the vulnerability in the same lab report.

Share

And now the part I actually came here to say.

When I ask myself why the number came back 34, my mind wants to go to the shelf. The gummies, the powders, the patches, the red light. The things with receipts.

But that’s not the truth. Or it’s not most of it.

The truth is that the deepest reasons don’t cost anything at all.

I stopped drinking alcohol. Eleven months ago I took the substance I used to soften my life and I set it down, and my body has been thanking me in ways I can measure and ways I can’t.

I meditate every day. Not perfectly. Daily.

I got out of survival mode. For years my nervous system ran like an alarm that no one ever turned off. Fight or flight as a lifestyle. The healing that changed my bloodwork started there, below the surface, in the slow unglamorous work of teaching my body it was safe.

I searched my soul. I unblocked the places I was stuck. I did the interior excavation nobody sees and nobody can inject.

And I am loved well. I live in a healthy relationship with a man who makes my life calmer, not harder. Ask any doctor what chronic stress does to the body. Then ask what its absence does.

None of that has a price tag. Not one item on that list can be purchased, prescribed, or poured at a brunch at the Hotel Bel Air.

I keep thinking about that morning under the flowers. All of us in that beautiful room, the whole gleaming industry of turning back time, and I have so much respect for the science in those seats. I’ve benefited from it. I’ve been public about benefiting from it. And let’s be clear, I have a few new appointments in the pipeline. Why have I been asleep on Sculptra?!

Subscribe now

But the youngest thing about me was invisible from the stage.

It’s in my blood. It’s in my nervous system. It’s in the eleven months of clear mornings and the daily stillness and the love I came home to that night.

And tomorrow, like every morning, I’ll stir a scoop of Pique Marine Collagen into my coffee. The very thing I was going on about at dinner when a new acquaintance mistook me for a professional. Some things on the shelf do earn their keep. I’ll be sharing the full list of what has, links and all, in a companion piece soon.

You cannot see 34 on my face. That was never where it lived.

Start below the surface.

With love from the ranch,

Catt

Leave a comment

Almost instantly, I felt something underneath the joy that is harder to describe. A kind of collapse. A release. As if a body that has been braced for most of my adult life finally got the news that it could stand down. In the days since, I keep catching it happening. Shoulders dropping. Jaw unclenching. Fifty-one years old, and I am only now learning what I feel like when I’m not waiting for something to go wrong.

I said yes. And first, I want to tell you who I said yes to.

Greg is one of the steadiest humans I have ever known. He is my anchor and my best friend, the one who shows up the same on the hard days as the easy ones. He is the person you’d want next to you when the earth shakes. For almost five years, he has been my safest place, and now he is officially my ride or die. Cemented. Chosen. My person, formally and forever.

But steady doesn't mean simple. Greg is an artist to his core, and creating is his love language. He makes ice cream with the intensity of a man possessed. He spends hours musing in the dirt with his plants and his cactus and his ground covers, talking about them constantly, and comes home with a trunk full of new plants and rocks and treasures lifted from nature like some kind of botanical klepto. He'll redesign a piece of clothing for one of his kids or mock up their school projects with the artistic eye and attention to detail he brings to every single thing. He also lets me control the remote which is kind of amazing in and of itself.

But here's the thing about this man: he doesn't do anything he loves just once. He built an outdoor fire pit. And then he made three more. He didn't put a putting green in the backyard. He erected an entire golf course. Nine tee boxes. Because the thing I love about him most is that he doesn't see a no. His imagination has no ceiling, anything is possible, and he doesn't just say it, he builds it. I have never seen anything like it. That's how he loves, too. In abundance, with his hands, with devotion, taking endless pride in the home and the life we are building together.

Now back to my yes. It’s the easiest decision I have ever made.

But here’s the rest of the truth.

I got the love story wrong for most of my life. Spectacularly wrong. A man like Greg did not simply happen to me. I had to become someone who could recognize him, and that took everything.

So, this is a piece about a remarkable man, yes. But it’s also a piece about what I had to unlearn before a good love could actually land. The road to him is the story.

The rest of this one is for paid subscribers — the ten years it took to get here, the part where I almost left, and the map I'd hand any woman who's stopped believing. Join us.

Read more

Every Fourth of July weekend, underneath the fireworks and the flags and the smell of somebody’s grill, there is this other thing humming for me. July 2nd. The day we lost him. For a long time that date felt like a bruise on the calendar. But that’s not really the case anymore.

First, I want you to meet him.

Stan the Man

My dad was 6’4” with dark hair, full lips, and a mustache that came and went with the decades. He had dark brown eyes that twinkled. That is the only word for it. They twinkled. People called him Stan the Man, and it fit, because he had that thing you can’t teach. He would move into a room with total ease and the room would tilt toward him. People wanted to be near him. And when you were in his presence, you felt lucky. Chosen, even. You had all of his light shining directly onto you.

My parents divorced when I was two, and for a lot of my childhood (my earliest years) there were 50 miles between his house and my mom’s. This was long before cell phones, before texting, before any of the ways we stay tethered now. So my time with him was limited, and it was cherished. When I was with him, my whole world lit up. When I was away from him, there was a gap I could feel in my body.

He had a saying: eat your dessert first. That was his whole philosophy in four words. Don’t put off life. Don’t postpone the good times. Life is fleeting, so be here for it. And he lived it. He loved a cigar. He loved an expensive tequila. He loved baseball, he would sometimes make it to the Masters, and he loved pleasure, simple things, in all its forms without apology. I think that’s the real reason people wanted to be near him. He didn’t worry. He wasn’t stressed. He had this cool, calm confidence, a man who knew his place in the world and that was magnetic. He was athletic, handsome, and just so damn good to be around. A real man, in the truest sense.

He played the banjo. He loved bluegrass and John Prine. He hunted, he fished, he kept squirrel feeders and bird feeders and knew his regulars by sight. He always had a dog at his side. For many years it was Roscoe, his best friend who traveled with him for every adventure. In his final days it was Oodles, a dog he walked daily and was completely devoted to. He was at one with nature in a way I didn’t understand as a young woman because I was moving too fast. Building a career. Traveling the world. Raising babies. I remember, over the years, that he would occasionally joke that all he really wanted was to live in a cabin in the woods.

Even his work was the land. Real estate was his life. He ran Sadler Real Estate in Martinsville, Indiana with his wife, and while the other agents worked the residential listings, I remember my dad always wanted the land. He would go out on foot and walk it, moving through Morgan County the way he moved through everything, unhurried and paying attention, discovering the untouched and undiscovered corners of the place where he was born and raised.

I never really asked him about any of it at length. I wish I had asked more questions.

Two calls

When it all began to end, I was in Kenya.

There were two phone calls on that trip.

It was my first time in Africa, traveling through the countryside with my mom. At some point I called my dad, and somewhere in that conversation we discussed how he had never made it there. He would have loved it. The vast, wide-open spaces. The majesty of it all. Land that felt alive under your feet. The wildlife. I remember trying to detail every single thing I was witness to there, wanting to share the exhilaration of the safari, the magic of the landscape, and the sounds I could hear while sleeping under the stars in my tent.

He was dreaming of a cabin in the woods back home while I stood in the wildest country I had ever seen. I was starting to understand that I was walking around inside his language.

The second call came on day eleven or twelve, and it was my brother. It was time. If I could get home, I needed to do it fast. My mom and I hired a puddle jumper to get me back to Nairobi, and from there I flew alone across the world to Indianapolis, then made my way home to Martinsville, the small town where we’re from.

I made it. After years of watching lung cancer slowly take him, I got days with him. Actually, on those days, he was in his home with my siblings as other family members would come and go. He sat in his famous chair in the main room, the weakest I had ever seen him. What I remember, at least my memory, is that there was no fear in his eyes. No anger. But instead, there seemed to be some delight. Appreciation for his loved ones gathered close.

On the morning of July 2nd, my siblings were awake early as he passed. I came downstairs a few moments later. I’ll hold the most private details of that morning close, but I can tell you I felt two things at once: devastation, and relief that he was finally free of the pain. We sat together in silence, five kids and his wife, trying to adjust to a world that no longer had him in it.

Or so we thought.

Read more

Read more

However, this is not a story about Mexico. This is a story about escape.

It’s about being so starved for rest (and sometimes love) that I confused numbing with healing, disappearing with rejuvenating. It’s about what I was really running from underneath the sunscreen and the salt air — myself, mostly. The relentless performance of holding it all together.

If you’ve ever needed to leave your own life for a few days just to survive it, you already know exactly what I mean. This is for you.

Not the hangover. Not even the occasional embarrassment, exactly. The quieter thing. The thing that would find me on the plane ride home, my nervous system still revved from days of drinking around the clock, body humming with the residue of it all while my mind slowly began to reconstruct what I was returning to. Real life. Responsibilities. Detox. Re-entry.

Nobody really talks about that transition. It’s jarring in a way that’s both physical and emotional — knowing you have to get some order back to your days while simultaneously reckoning with whatever the trip had revealed. The lapses in judgment that showed themselves in the daylight. The text to an ex I shouldn’t have sent. The name I couldn’t quite remember belonging to a face I vaguely could.

My nervous system was still at the party. The rest of me was already home.

I was a woman with a high-pressure television career, two sons, a life that demanded I be “on” in ways that are hard to explain unless you’ve lived it. The glossy A-list events, the stilettos, the designer labels, the camera always somewhere nearby. Mexico was the antidote to all of it. Barefoot and sun-warm and blissfully informal in a way I was starving for — and I couldn’t always name that hunger all those years, but that’s exactly what it was. A starvation for ease.

Alcohol didn’t escalate over those twenty years. It didn’t get darker or more extreme. It was simply always there. The most used accessory on every trip, except I never had to pack it because it was waiting for me upon arrival. Or on the flight there. Or, honestly, at the airport bar before departure. It went with the territory the same way the ocean did. It was just part of Mexico.

(That’s actually more insidious than an escalation story, I think. It wasn’t a spiral. It was ambient.)

Subscribe now

I want to be careful here because it wasn’t all like that. I traveled to Mexico many times with girlfriends and we made memories I genuinely treasure. We were wild and free and alive in the way that women get to be when they leave their daily selves at home for a few days. And once, on one of those trips, I met a really great guy. A beautiful soul. Much younger than me (I’ll just throw that in there for my hardcore, longtime followers - ha!). We bonded over tequila the way you do when the stars and the humidity and the right song are all working together. The connection lasted well beyond the vacation. I met his family. I traveled to where he lived. It was a sweet and erotic little chapter, the kind you tuck away and smile at years later.

But there were other trips. The ones I’ve written about before — missing my son’s baseball game on a livestream as I slept at the pool, the phone in my hand full of texts I shouldn’t have sent. Exchanging horrific jabs with an ex while I was somewhere beautiful and in too much pain to enjoy it. Those trips stand out differently in my memory.

Especially the ones after my first divorce, when I was a woman trying to feel chosen again. I would go out to the bars and this is hard for any woman to admit - it was about being noticed, being flattered, having some man look at me like I was worth something. Why? Because I wasn’t giving that to myself. My standards weren’t where they should have been because my self-worth wasn’t where it should have been. I was trying to fill the void with someone else’s admiration instead of my own. That feels like a lifetime ago. Because it was.

Here’s the part that doesn’t make it into the pretty beach photos: there is a very specific and unspoken social contract in places like Cabo. A collective agreement that functions the way Vegas does — no clocks, no rules, it’s five o’clock somewhere, so we wake up and start the party early and nobody has to think about the night before or what’s coming next. You just reset. You pour another drink and you’re back to good vibes. The shame from last night? It dissolves in the morning margarita. It’s almost built into the architecture of the experience.

And when everyone around you is doing it, it stops feeling like a choice at all. It just feels like Tuesday at the swim-up bar.

That’s what made it so easy to stay in it. And so hard to see clearly while I was.

I want to be careful here because I think there’s a sanitized version of sobriety. The one where you wake up one day and never think about a drink again. That’s not the one I’m living. Ten months in now, the pull isn’t massive. There’s no moment at the swim-up bar where I’m fighting some enormous, unbearable wave. (And I know I’m lucky in that sense.) It’s subtler than that.

What I notice is the absence of the buzz. Things used to elevate and escalate — the pendulum would swing, the afternoon would get louder and warmer and more thrilling. Now, instead, my engine just kind of hums along nice and evenly. And I’m still adapting to that. Learning to find the exuberation elsewhere. But I want to be honest that I notice its absence, because pretending I don’t would be its own kind of lie.

Share

Because here’s what I’ve come to understand: missing the escape is not the same as missing the drink.

What I miss, if I’m being completely honest, is the trapdoor. The permission to stop being me for a few hours. To leave Catt Sadler. The one who is climbing, building, evolving, doing the work. To leave her at the door and just... not be her for a while. Even in a beautiful life, even in a life I am genuinely proud of, sometimes she just needs a damn break from being her. The exhaustion of becoming is real. And for twenty years, alcohol was how I took that break.

Sobriety didn’t remove that need. It just took away my old way of meeting it. And I’m still learning new ones. Healthier ones.

I just returned from this trip. I walked on that beach at sunset. I ordered my NA drinks. I watched the cocktail menu get passed around the table and I felt my engine hum and I thought: I am genuinely not her anymore.

She’s not a goal anymore. She’s not aspirational. She’s actually here! She’s showing up in the spiritual quality of the mornings, in the way the sand feels under her feet and the palm trees feel overhead. The ocean feels like something I’m finally actually inside of rather than blurring at the edges. I feel more alive than I have in decades.

This higher version of myself I’ve been dedicated to one day meeting? She’s arrived.

She feels free. She feels good in her bones. She feels wise in a way that’s different from smart — it’s a knowing that lives deeper. She understands now, in her cells, that everything she ever went looking for outside herself was already inside her. That she is not alone. That her mind is forever expanding and her vision is limitless.

That the patterns and habits and neural pathways that once made her small are not permanent. That through neuroplasticity, through practice, through choosing herself again and again and again, she can actually rewire the life she moves through.

It is possible. I am here to testify to this for you.

We have the key now. We actually have the key!

Five years ago, ten years ago, I would have thought that was too lofty a thing to say out loud. I don’t believe that anymore. My only job now is to build on this, brick by brick, and trust that the universe is assembling my life for its highest good — and then use this evolution as medicine. Not just for myself. For anyone who needs it.

If you’re working on becoming free of alcohol, coming home to yourself, and finally ‘resting’ from it all - that’s exactly what I walk you through in The How.

With love from the ranch,

Catt

Leave a comment

The line wasn’t moving. So I looked through the window.

And something stopped me.

Inside, teenagers were everywhere. Taking orders, flipping things, calling out names, bumping into each other, laughing at something I couldn’t hear. A girl at the window caught eyes with a cook and they both cracked up over some private joke. A kid in the back was doing something unnecessarily dramatic with a bag of ice.

It was completely ordinary. And I could not look away.

I sat there longer than I needed to, even after the line moved. Something in my chest had gone very quiet. I couldn’t name it immediately.

Then I could.

I was envious. Of the teenagers. In the Chick-fil-A.

My first real job was at a place called The Inside Scoop — an ice cream shop in Martinsville, Indiana, independently owned by one of our teachers and a local baseball commissioner. The literal Small Town a few miles over from the one John Mellancamp sang about. The kind of place where people actually knew each other’s names.

Every weekend, the sports teams would pile in after their games, sunburned and loud and victorious or defeated, and we’d serve them. They’d be so happy because it’s ice cream — what’s not to love? I learned to perfect the swirl cone. I learned to make a malt. I learned how to close up a shop at the end of a long shift with your friends and feel, in some wordless way, like you had done something.

I have a photo from that summer in 1990 (working on locating it!) Me and some friends, criminally tan from the tanning bed (a different era, we know, we know), clearly five pounds heavier from quality-testing every flavor on the menu. We look completely unself-conscious. We look like teens who have nowhere better to be.

How apropos, by the way, that my first job was called The Inside Scoop and I would spend the next thirty years in journalism. The universe has always been sending me a wink and a smile.

Here is what I think happened to us — not just to me, but to a lot of us.

We got very efficient. Very optimized. Very flexible. We got the freedom we said we wanted, and we took it, and we retreated into our separate little rectangles — our screens, our home offices, our carefully curated solo workflows. We went from rooms full of people to Brady Bunch grids on Zoom. We traded the ambient electricity of other humans for the clean, quiet control of working alone. In our own precious little psilo.

And I’m not here to say it’s all bad. It isn’t. There is real beauty in autonomy. I know this firsthand after leaving the network tv job and transitioning into the freedom that independent media provides.

But something got lost in the trade, and I think we’re only just beginning to admit it.

What got lost was frequency. The actual, physical, crackling energy that only exists when you’re in a room with other people working toward something together. One person’s half-formed idea catches a spark from someone else’s offhand comment and suddenly there’s something in the air that didn’t exist sixty seconds ago. You cannot manufacture that on a video call. You cannot schedule it. It just happens, or it doesn’t, and it only happens in proximity.

What got lost was the finish line. The thing you could hold, or air, or point to at the end of the day. Here’s what we made. Here’s what we did. See it? When I was on television — twenty-some years, hosting, reporting, showing up — every single day ended with a show. A real, actual, measurable thing we made together. Producers, editors, writers, stage managers, lighting guys, audio grips, all of us pulling toward the same moment. When it was good, you felt it in the room. That feeling was a drug, and I did not understand how much I was going to miss it.

What got lost was the accident of other people. The way someone else’s presence interrupts your own patterns. Pulls you out of your head. Makes you laugh at something you didn’t expect. Reminds you that you are not the only person on earth with a mind and a theory and a particular take on things.

We need to be interrupted. We need to be surprised. We need other people’s energy to ignite something in us that we simply cannot reach alone.

The teenagers in the Chick-fil-A had it. They had all of it. And they had no idea.

Subscribe now

I want to be careful here, because the chapter I’ve been living in — the one on my fifty acres in the Santa Monica Mountains, what I affectionately call the island — that chapter was not a mistake.

It was required.

I needed the quiet. I needed the land and the birds and the long mornings and the space to write and think and feel things I had been outrunning for years. The healing that happened in that stillness was real and it was hard-won and I would not trade a single slow afternoon of it.

But here is what nobody tells you about choosing to retreat: at some point, if you’re not paying attention, the thing that was protecting you becomes the thing that is containing you. The island stops being a sanctuary and starts being a story you tell yourself about why you’re not ready yet.

Safety can masquerade as wisdom. Stillness can masquerade as peace. I know the difference now, because I can feel it — the difference between I need this and I’m afraid.

I’m not afraid anymore. Or maybe I am, and I’m going in anyway.

The stars, for what it’s worth, agree.

We’re in the year of the Fire Horse. The Strawberry Moon is rising in June, and for Virgo, the message couldn’t be louder: go. Not someday. Now. Out of the gate, full speed, back in the room.

I’m not someone who outsources my decisions to the cosmos, but I do believe in confirmation. And when what you feel in your body lines up with what’s written in the sky, you pay attention.

Something is opening. I can feel it before I can see it.

I don’t know exactly what form it takes yet. Maybe a new podcast. Maybe something I haven’t imagined. Maybe it’s simpler than that — more walks with new friends, more wellness retreats, a yes to the meeting I might have talked myself out of last year.

What I know is this: I am saying yes to more rooms. More people. More friction, more electricity, more of the beautiful mess of collaboration. More chances for the accident of someone else’s idea to collide with mine in a way neither of us planned.

And for the women reading this who know exactly what I’m talking about — who have been healing, or hiding, or both, who have been so careful and so self-protective that they’ve accidentally made themselves very, very small — I want to say:

The island was good. It served you. You can leave now.

You don’t have to know what comes next. You just have to open the door.

The swirl cone isn’t going to perfect itself. In other words, we’re back, bitches!

Share

Now I want to hear from you.

• When’s the last time you were in a room working toward something with other people? What did that feel like in your body?

• Is there an “island” in your life right now? Be honest: is it healing you, or is it hiding you?

• What’s one thing you’ve said no to lately that you told yourself was self-care, but might actually have been fear?

• If you let yourself be seen again in a big way this year, what would that even look like?

• What’s your version of the swirl cone — the simple, collaborative, hands-on thing you miss making with other people?

• What would it cost you to say yes to one more coffee, one more walk, one more invitation this month?

• Tell me in the comments: where are you on this spectrum right now? Healing in your cocoon, or hiding in it?

Leave a comment

With love from the ranch,

Catt

If you’re new here, welcome. There are hundreds of new SUBSTANTIAL subscribers here recently and I am ecstatic that our community is growing. Many of you found your way here through a piece I wrote about my facelift — the real story, the one I hadn’t told anywhere else. I’m so glad it reached you. I’m especially glad you stayed.

But here’s the thing. That story in many ways was never about my face.

SUBSTANTIAL is about becoming. Not becoming something you aren’t, and not discarding the parts of you that survived the hard years and carried you to this exact moment. But becoming the person you aspire to enjoy living inside of.

These offerings are simply an invitation. An open door. I want you to know that real metamorphosis is available to you and I am a living, breathing example of that. I’ll spend the rest of this essay proving it.

One for dinner

It was a Tuesday in August about five years ago. Golden hour, the kind that only exists in late California summer when the sun takes its time going down, like it knows something you don’t.

I was sitting on the patio at Angelini Osteria. White silky blouse, vintage Levi’s, and a low heel that’s just high enough to invoke an added layer of confidence. There was a smile on my face that I hadn’t put there deliberately. It had just arrived.

When I walked up to the host stand that night I said something I had been rehearsing, without knowing it, for thirty years.

One for dinner, please.

Not just one. One.

I know the difference. I learned it at twenty years old, working the host stand at a restaurant in Bloomington, Indiana, during college. My manager pulled me aside early: never say just one to a solo diner. That word does something to a person. It confirms what they feared when they walked in alone. That they are less than. That one is not enough.

I never forgot it. And on that summer night, three decades later, I walked up to that host stand knowing in my body what I hadn’t been able to hold in my mind for most of my adult life.

One is exactly enough. One is, in fact, the whole point.

But let me back up. Because the patio at Angelini’s is not where this story begins.

It begins at fourteen.

I was in love with the varsity football star. The way you can only be in love at fourteen — completely, recklessly, with no self-preservation instinct whatsoever. He cheated on me. He grabbed my arm too hard, knocked the wind out of me once. We pushed and shoved each other in his bedroom while the adults had no idea.

I didn’t know then that I was establishing a pattern. What felt like love and intensity was actually the first groove being carved into a record that would play on repeat for decades. There was a storm happening in my own family at the time — one I won’t get into today — and I escaped into that relationship the way you escape into anything when you’re drowning. Completely. Without looking back.

I would spend most of my adult life running toward red flags. Not away from them. Toward them. Chemistry that felt like danger. Intensity that felt like love. I mistook chaos for passion so many times I stopped being able to tell the difference.

In my last serious relationship before the one I’m in now, I was crippled. That’s the only word for it. I drove by his house in the dark. I checked his phone. I begged to be chosen. I accepted non-truths because the alternative — being alone, being abandoned, disrupting my boys’ lives again — felt unsurvivable. On the outside I was presenting as a champion for women. Strength. Ambition. Confidence. The Instagram highlight reel, fully celebrated.

Underneath? I was disgusted with myself.

I was drinking regularly, often to escape the feeling of existing inside a life that looked right from the outside and felt like slow suffocation from within. Nobody would have guessed. I barely let myself know.

Then I hit the floor.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. More like the way something deflates — slowly, and then suddenly you’re flat on the ground and there’s nowhere left to go but up.

I found Dr. Rick. We met twice a week for a year. I did the hot yoga. I read the books. I went deep into trauma bonds and codependency and the neuroscience of attachment and started to understand, for the first time, my why. Why I allowed it. Why I chased it. Why I kept returning to the burning building and calling it home.

I stopped lying to myself.

That part sounds simple. It was the hardest thing I have ever done.

Because the lies weren’t dramatic. They were quiet. He didn’t mean it. This is just how love feels. I can fix this. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.

Stopping the lies meant sitting with what was actually true. And what was actually true was that I had been abandoning myself, consistently and thoroughly, since I was fourteen years old.

Dr. Rick suggested one day that I take myself on a date. Get dressed up. Go somewhere nice. Sit down. Order something good. Party of one.

So I did.

And here is the thing I want you to understand about that night, because it matters more than the restaurant or the robust glass of wine or the twilight, as beautiful as all of it was.

I created it.

Not accidentally. Not by luck. I had spent months rebuilding the interior — the thoughts, the beliefs, the story I was telling myself about who I was and what I deserved. I had been choosing differently, quietly and imperfectly, day after day. And by the time I sat down at that table, I had built a frequency. A real one. The love I had been cultivating inward was now radiating outward, and the world was simply reflecting it back.

The waiters smiled. Strangers made easy eye contact. The evening felt almost spiritual.

That’s not magic. That’s quantum mechanics. That’s the absolute truth of how this works: the reality we experience is not an accident. It is what we have created through our thoughts, our emotions, our choices, our actions, our energy. I had manufactured that beautiful night long before I arrived. The restaurant was just where I finally got to feel the proof.

I sat there with a calm that belonged entirely to me and I thought: I am different now. I made it through.

Not healed. Not finished. Different.

Subscribe now

Here is what I know now that I wish someone had told me earlier. I’m sharing it not as inspiration but as instruction, because there’s a difference.

You do not have to love yourself first and then build the life. You act your way into the love. You build toward it. It arrives as a byproduct, not a prerequisite.

And this is what that actually looked like for me, concretely, on the ground:

• I got intimate with my gut and stopped betraying her. When something felt wrong I stopped explaining it away. When a red flag appeared I stopped running toward it. The first few times this felt like deprivation. Eventually it started to feel like self-respect. Eventually it started to feel like sovereignty. Your body doesn’t lie. Listen to her.

• I meditated. Most days for five years. Not perfectly. Not always meaningfully. But consistently enough that my nervous system began to regulate in ways I didn’t know were possible. Additional breathwork helped. The result? The reactivity softened. The spiral thinking slowed. I became someone I could actually live inside. I liked her company.

• I built a blueprint. Not a vision board. A real one. What did I deserve? What did I actually want my life to look like? What was I willing to stop tolerating? I wrote it down. I came back to it. I let it evolve as I evolved. Matt Cooke’s Evolve Manifestation Course gave me the map for staying consistently in love with myself — choosing your reality, believing what you desire, building the habits that make you someone you recognize, admire, and respect.

• And I stopped drinking. Today marks 298 days alcohol free. It was the final lie I stopped telling myself. The one I had negotiated around the longest. The one that, once I put it down, changed everything downstream. (I wrote The How - A Guide to Letting Go and Coming Home to Yourself if this speaks to you.)

When you do this work long enough the baby steps accumulate into something you can stand on. You become less reactive. More love-centered. Less susceptible to bad weather and shiny distractions and the temptations that used to undo you. The ripple effect? You become better at every single thing.

Share SUBSTANTIAL

I’m sitting here this morning with my coffee, Greg and the kids still sleeping, the ranch quiet in that particular way it gets just before the day starts.

I think about the woman who drove by my ex’s house in the dark. I think about her with so much tenderness now. She was doing the only thing she knew how to do. She was trying to survive.

And I think about the woman on the patio at Angelini’s, surrounded by the mystic light and that easy, peaceful feeling consuming her. We made up, she and I.

That’s what self-love actually is, I think. Not bubble baths and affirmations. Not the highlight reel finally matching the interior. It’s the moment you stop being at war with yourself. The repair. The reconciliation. Looking at the woman who made all the choices you’re not proud of and deciding, firmly and without performance, that she is still worth choosing.

You don’t have to have it all together to begin.

You just have to begin.

And then one day you’ll walk up to a host stand, alone, in your best vintage denim, and say the words like you mean them.

One for dinner.

Not just one.

One.

With love from the ranch,

Catt

Leave a comment

I smiled. I hugged her. I told her to text me and I’d tell her anything she wants to know.

And then I drove home through the canyon thinking: three years. Three years and it is still the first thing.

Not the ranch life I’m building from nothing. Not the alcohol-free living I am nine months deep inside. Not the memoir I am writing or the new audio series I launched or the grief I transmuted into something I can actually live inside. Not any of that.

The face.

Read more

A reminder these audio notes are unedited, raw, and intended to be weekly! They are for my inner circle, my paid subscribers, my…

Read more