Introducing PLOT TWIST: a perimenopause retreat!
And (plot twist) I'm moving to Mexico.
1. Perimenopausal folks: come spend a week in Oaxaca, Mexico with me this fall!
What: Plot Twist, a retreat for people in perimenopause
When: September 27-October 3, 2026 (five full days, six nights)
Where: Oaxaca City, Mexico
Who: 9 guests total (a very small group, by design)
Learn more and apply at plottwistoaxaca.com! This link isn’t connecting in email preview for some reason and I can’t figure it out. Gah! Please copy and paste https://plottwistoaxaca.com into your browser, it works there!
Why: I’ve been wanting to host a perimenopause retreat for a long time, and I’m so excited to finally offer this one, co-led with my dear friend Laurenne Sala1.
“Transformation” sounds like a great time – until you’re in it. And perimenopause? For many of us, it looks and feels more like destruction. Your mind and body betray you. You don’t recognize yourself. The loneliness can be excruciating. The people in your life can’t understand what you’re going through. Doctors’ best estimate of how long you’ll be in it is “1 to 11 years.” And every mainstream cultural message you’ve ever heard has told you it’s a one-way slide into invisibility, obscurity, and irrelevance.
This is a bunch of BS. Menopause is liberation. And a liberated woman is dangerous as fuck.
Perimenopause is a crucible, and the destruction it wreaks has a holy purpose: to help you burn away anything and everything that no longer fits. To deliberately let go of the beliefs, behaviors, roles, and relationships you’ve outgrown. To re-evaluate what you actually care about. To ask yourself who you were before the world threw a big wet blanket over your light. To uncover and discover what you truly want. And to take big leaps – or small but meaningful ones! – in the direction of freedom and alignment, however you define them.
Through writing, creativity, witnessing and being witnessed, ceremonial ritual, the magic of Oaxaca, and unbridled support for your messy, tired, hopeful, scared, questioning, brave self, we’ll guide and support you to do a deep dive into what stays and what goes, release and grieve, and write a new story about the life you’re creating.
This is a very small group on purpose: only nine spots total. We'll get to know you, you'll get to know each other, we’ll fit in two cars. Everyone gets their own room and bathroom in a beautiful villa. We're also going to do and eat and experience incredible Oaxaca things, all in support of you becoming your most embodied, expressed, relaxed self. It's going to be epic, seriously.
If any of the above feels like a YES, this retreat is for you!
Read all about it and apply at plottwistoaxaca.com.
*The link to the Plot Twist site isn’t connecting in email preview. Gah! Please copy and paste http://plottwistoaxaca.com into your browser, it works there!
2. A (related) life update.
On June 1st, I’m boarding a one-way flight from PDX to Oaxaca, Mexico, to begin a new chapter as an immigrant with my partner, six suitcases, two very reluctant cats, and just enough Spanish to be able to clumsily ask questions but not understand the answers (yet!).
The rest of our physical lives, except for what fits in a 10-by-15 storage unit, is in the process of being sold, donated, gifted, recycled, shredded, or otherwise disposed of. House, cars, furniture, clothes, books, tchotchkes, towels of unknown origin. Twenty-two notebooks full of product ideas and hand-lettered Instagram posts and lists of things I vowed to do differently in my business. Eight cubic feet of medical records and scans from cancer treatment 25 years ago.
An embarrassing volume of unidentified cables. All the former computers I stared at for tens of thousands of hours, trading life force for an identity and a paycheck. And boxes and boxes of old Em & Friends product samples that two years ago, I couldn’t imagine letting go of.
This month, I am choosing to destroy the tangible evidence of every decision I’ve ever made, and everything that’s happened to me, since I became an adult.
It’s a death event, and I gotta say I’m here for it. Happy 50th birthday to me.2
In spring 2024, my mom died after a very short illness; I finally crossed the menopause threshold after a ten-year perimenopause so gnarly I worried I might not survive it; and I got Covid that would become long Covid that would become chronic Epstein-Barr.
After the menopause and the dead mom and the short Covid, but before the long Covid and Epstein-Barr showed up, I wrote in this newsletter:
My perimenopausal decade felt like sitting (thrashing, flailing) in a pot boiling on a stove, and now, this is clear: the boiling was boiling down — a concentration process, cooking off what wasn’t necessary, leaving me as my essence. I feel strong and potent. I stick to the back of a spoon.
The anxiety, fear, and trauma my mom held in her body made it difficult for her to fully enjoy her life. I can hear her, from wherever she is now, begging me to enjoy mine.
Menopause and my mom’s death, taken together, have felt like an initiation; stepping through a portal into a life that has very little tolerance for misalignment.
A couple months later, chronic illness was the hurricane that swept through and made me prove it. When you don’t have the capacity to get out of bed, living in alignment stops being a choice. I’m lucky as hell in that I’ve mostly recovered, but this recovery is dependent upon slowing down, letting my body lead, and doing only what’s most essential.
I can’t even pretend to know what’s waiting on the other side of this move.3 But after four years of asking myself what wants to die?, waiting for the answers to come, and acting (or, mostly non-acting) accordingly, a new clarity has (finally) emerged, and it’s time to take a leap in the direction of aliveness.
Thanks for reading and for being here,
PS: If you’re currently in the crucible of perimenopause and you’d like to come spend a beautiful week in Oaxaca with me and like-hearted souls, retreat applications are open!
*The link above isn’t connecting in email preview for some reason and I can’t figure it out. So annoying. Please copy and paste https://plottwistoaxaca.com into your browser, it works there!
Laurenne is a writer, grief facilitator, yoga teacher, somatic practitioner, one of the funniest and most compassionate people I’ve ever known, a Oaxaca resident, a fluent Spanish speaker, and an expert in honest conversations about hard things. I love her and you will too. We’ve been friends since 2010, when we both still wrote commercials for a living.
June 5th!
currently on the post-move agenda: studying textile arts and ceramics with master craftspeople; making slow, non-commercial art that would perform terribly on Instagram; lots and lots of Spanish lessons; figuring out how to survive without eating corn (autoimmune allergy SUCH A BUMMER); sitting in the sun; meeting with clients on zoom (same as I do now); working on some big projects with Lisa Congdon and Holly Whitaker that are coming in 2027. Making new friends. Body kindness. Being an open-hearted, curious beginner. Treading as lightly as possible, and with immense gratitude and respect for the people of Oaxaca. Slowing down. Seeing what happens next and next and next.