Erin: Welcome to Hotter Than Ever, where we uncover the unconscious rules we've been following, e break those rules and we find a new path to being freer, happier, sexier and more satisfied in the second half of our lives. I'm your host, Erin Keating.
Happy, happy 2025 hotties. Oh, we made it through 2024. And before we launch into this new year, I want to take a little bit of time to reflect on the year behind me, the year behind us, in the year to come. So expect a lot of personal details and navel gazing about what 2024 contained for me personally, which I am hoping will be relevant to you and where you are in your own lives.
My intention for this conversation, well, really conversation with myself, with you, whatever this confessional format is in these solo episodes, my intention is that my reflections might help you to also take a look back and do some introspecting about what your year was about and what this chapter was like in the story of your life.
So often we rush through everything to get to the next thing and we don't stop to look and identify the patterns and themes that are coming forward and consider what it all means in the scheme of our past and our future, our growth, our hopes, our dreams, our evolution as human beings here on planet Earth in relation to other human beings and to ourselves. I'm going to talk about what my year was like and then I'm going to share an exercise with you that may help you do some reflecting on how you spent your time in 2024.
So in the beginning of 2024, I had said that this was going to be the year of faith, which really was my way of reinforcing to myself that even though I am kind of out on a limb doing life and career and sex and relationships and money and parenting differently than I have in the past, that everything was going to work out just as it should and that all I really needed to do was believe that, believe in that and trust the path that I have put myself on. And very quickly into the year, I also realized that 2024 was the year of the body for me. I lived my life in my body this year in a way that I do not think that I ever have until now. And I am 53 years old, you know, that was because of a combination of factors. You know, one thing I'm challenging myself to do at this point in my life is to go directly at the things that terrify me and directly at the things that intrigue me and that I'm curious about and to look under all of the scary rocks where the creepy crawlies live.
And one place that has always been dangerous territory for me has been my body. My preference has been to put my fingers in my ears and go la la la la la. And pretend like I was just a head walking around in the world with nothing below the neck. I've talked about this a lot in the podcast, so this will not be unfamiliar to regular listeners, but I think it's really important to talk about because maybe you will relate to this. Me and my body, we have not always been friends. We've been estranged even at different points and certainly for most of my life, I was not looking at my body as a source of pleasure or positivity. Although, as you know, part of the mission of Hotter Than Ever is to change that.
But this year has been a year of really profound healing and change and love and pleasure and transformation when it comes to that central relationship in my life between my mental and spiritual self and the meat suit that I walk around in. There was a punk band called the Meat Puppets and I always thought that was so gross and also kind of so cool. And I love what an awesome punk rock and existential way that is of thinking about our bodies. We are spiritual beings on this planet and our bodies are the vehicles by which we traverse this lifetime. Okay, that's a little cosmic. You know, starting at the top of the year, I was in love with the Marine and my body started to tell me that something was wrong. You know, it was a very physical relationship. It was a very visceral relationship.
I have never been in a relationship with someone who my body liked so much. My body wanted to be near his body. It made me feel calm, it made me feel secure, it made me feel peaceful, made me feel protected. And then it also turned me on. But something started to feel off in that and, you know, lo and behold, he broke up with me out of the blue because he wasn't feeling like this was a long term relationship he wanted to be in. And he was right, he was right.
And the universe ripped the band aid off, ended that relationship and said to me, you've learned the lessons, you're going to learn from this one, let's move on. Boy, did my body like him, my body allowed me to overlook the fact that we were so far apart on the political spectrum, it would never have been reconcilable in the long term. And I am grateful to the lessons of that relationship and to the physical experience of that relationship for showing me something that I had never felt before with someone, that was a big deal. My body bridged the political divide, you guys. Unfortunately, we were not able to heal America. That is going to be for someone else's cross politics relationship.
But getting out of that relationship really freed me up to consider my relationship with my body and my weight. Because he was a guy who liked women of a certain size and I always felt like those were the only guys who would like me. That if I was somebody's fetish, that of my overweightness, my curves, my softness, my fleshiness was what someone was into, then we had a shot. But that certainly always made me feel like I was living in a narrow pool of romantic possibilities. So when I broke up with him, I was about 210 pounds. I'm 5" 10, I carry it well as they say. I have presence, I had been doing pilates, I was starting to feel more present in my body.
But really, I thought in the spirit of hotter than ever, in the spirit of like, what is my own personal definition of my best life, I wanted to take on the idea that maybe I would enjoy life more if I was not overweight and if I didn't have all of these conditions on being somebody's fetish or kink or that no one would be in love with me, you know, unless I was that for them. I thought, you know, what would it be like if I took this albatross around my neck and I put it down and that albatross was all the extra weight I had been carrying? So I started to do weight loss drugs, and I started to lose weight, and that started in March of this year and I will come back to that later in the story of 2024.
Another thing that was up for me this year was medical stuff. Ew. But I decided this was the year I was really going to attend to myself medically. I had had some consistently irregular results in my blood tests over the years, and I started to investigate that. I also had a colonoscopy for the first time. I had a routine mammogram that became a second mammogram. That became an ultrasound that became a biopsy, which was totally fine and totally benign.
But that gave me a lot of stress and worry while I was going through it. I had these weird cysts that were uncomfortable, and I had to have those dealt with medically. And I won't go into the barbarism of that experience. And in my blood tests, I was always showing these outrageously elevated calcium numbers. So I decided to investigate that and I went to an endocrinologist who sent me for a bunch of tests. And across the months of the year, we realized that I needed to have surgery because I had a parathyroid condition and some growths on my parathyroid and I ended up having surgery in December. But Jesus Christ, I hate medical things. I hate them. I hate dealing with doctors and insurance and all of that stuff.
I hate doing what my cousin has coined the organ recital. That's when you get older. All you ever talk about is so and so had a kidney this and so and so had a liver that and someone's lung and someone's biopsy and oh my God, I do not enjoy the organ recital. And if you want to use that phrase, feel free. I will not charge you for it. That was this year, and maybe that is aging, but I did it. I did all that stuff. And I really took good care of my body this year. I really looked after her. And, oh, I also had an IUD taken out. I mean, literally every part of my body. If I look at it, I think I dealt with it in some way. Right.
I also was doing pilates a couple of times a week. And towards the end of the year, I added going to the regular gym and walking on the treadmill and lifting weights, which is something that I'm really excited to continue next year. And a lot of that was possible because I felt the weight coming off and I felt lighter and better in my own skin. I also did a lot of beauty treatments this year. I did a Morpheus radio frequency laser treatment on my face, which was fantastic for my skin. Highly recommend. Use the numbing cream. I did Botox and a little bit of filler like I've been doing for years.
I've made sure that my hair looks good. I've been enjoying fashion more because I'm, as I go down in size, I look better in clothes. I've lost about 30 pounds so far. And in addition to the weight, what I am shedding is some of the thoughts that I have had about my own body and my own attractiveness at different weights. And I've always been a woman that people considered attractive. But my own story really has to do with so much judgment around my weight and my body. And it's just a relief to start to shed that and to think, no, I'm actually kind of normal. I'm actually kind of normal.
You know, I could lose another 10 or 15 pounds. I'd like to. I think that would be good for me. I think that would be good for my joints. These are things we think about as we get older. But you know, my journey with my body has been a journey of listening to myself and what I really want. And with these miracle drugs I've taken it on and who knows what forever looks like and who knows if I'll ever go off them, and who knows and who knows and who knows.
But I am feeling good in my own skin. And I am inhabiting my body for the first time in my life in a really different way. And I am much kinder to myself, much kinder to myself. And that's not just in the form of what I say to myself when I look in the mirror, how I judge myself around my weight, but doing all of these medical things and making sure that I'm okay for myself and for my kids and for the long term. This shit is new for me. Other people are much better at this stuff.
I am really grateful for the willingness to do all the stuff I did this year around my body. I also want to reflect on my relationship with sex and love this year. I think I probably had more sex in the first year that I was separated from my ex. But I had more consistent lovers this year after I got my heart broken, after I learned my lessons from the Marine from that relationship, I got over heartache and heartbreak faster than I ever have. And I got deeper with some casual relationships and got more true to myself and my own boundary setting and self expression than I ever have before. And what that has allowed me to do looking forward into 2025 is to take those experiences where I told someone that I was uncomfortable with the way that ethical non monogamy was being practiced in his life and therefore I wasn't okay with continuing to be in a relationship with him. I told someone that I didn't think that his particular needs sexually if they couldn't expand to adapt to what I needed as well in my fantasies. If we were only going to live in his fantasies, then I couldn't continue to be in a sexual relationship with him.
You know, I know that I come at some of the stuff in a way that might seem backwards to other people, that I pursue sexual relationships that then evolve into intimate connections or more emotional dynamics. This is just the way that I'm doing it and I am trying not to judge myself for that. I don't think that I knew before this year what I really wanted out of a relationship. And pursuing intimacy in all these different ways and pursuing pleasure in all these different ways really helped me learn a lot about what I wanted. And I liked seeing myself as a woman who has a lot of men to juggle. I just think that's really sexy, I like being a woman who has lovers and eventually again I will be in love and I will have a primary partner. And I don't know what that will look like exactly, but I have gotten a lot clearer about what it is that I want.
And as the song goes, you can't get what you want till you know what you want. I don't even know who sings that. I feel like maybe fine young cannibals or something. God, that's a deep cut. Who? Going back to the 80s. But that for me, as a result of all this exploration, it was incredible to feel so wanted, to feel so turned on, to feel so desired, to feel like, well, I'm just the kind of woman that has a lot of men in her life. I've never been that person. I was in a monogamous, sexless marriage for a very, very, very long time.
So trying on this identity this year and in the past couple of years and going deeper in 2024 into my own wants and needs and honest truth telling about what those experiences felt like, talking directly to the men that I was in relationship with around how it was working for my needs. That's real growth and progress for me when I'm a person who really, really understands how to go along, to get along. This was a year of huge recovery for me and I am grateful to my therapist for sort of putting the word recovery on it. You know what my norm has been in my life has been relationships and work situations that feel like I am pushing myself into boxes where I was not comfortable and I was not fully self expressed. For a long time I was trying to live a life that felt prescribed by society and very achievement oriented and externally focused and disregarding my own internal compass. And this year I feel like I started to live a life that was more designed by me, for me. What I want for you, hottie, is to live a life of your own design. Live a life of your own choosing, not a default life, not the expected life where you're doing all the things for all the people in the exact right way and you think there's some kind of plan and some kind of rule book that you're living into.
What I want for you is to experiment and explore and find those parts of life doing it your way that feel custom made for you. That is what I'm trying to do, that is what I'm trying to model and share. That is how I think we are all going to feel so much more, more free. So I said in the beginning of the podcast that I would talk about an exercise that might be helpful for you this year. And that exercise is pretty straightforward. Go through your calendar and look at how you spent your time. Whose name pops up again and again and again? What activities pop up again and again? For me, I did 75 episodes of this podcast, which I am really proud of.
I started the substack and I have contributed to that intermittently, but have felt really good about writing. And I started writing my book in 2024. That is a hurdle, that is one of those lifting up a rock, looking at the creepy crawlies. That is a place like my body and my weight, where I have been in resistance to something that I knew I wanted to do and change. I want a writer. I want to write. I am saying it out loud for the first time. It is terrifying and I am saying it this year. I also chased a bunch of potential partnerships and collaborations and opportunities, one of which fell apart. And I spend a lot of energy on it and I licked my wounds over that for way too long. I don't think I'll do that again. I think I will heal faster. I will get over rejection faster. I will take the life lessons and move on and not be so stopped by what might have been. I think that happened to me this year and I'm ready to to do it differently next year on my calendar.
I spent time again and again and again with the same handful of five or ten friends. And it was an evolving group of friends. And we had lunch dates and dinner dates and weekends together and hangouts. And I am so grateful for the people that I spent time with. I up leveled so hard in terms of how I spent my time in personal relationships. I feel closer to the people in my life than I ever have before. My friends, my my lovers, my children. I feel so much closer to my children after devoting so much more energy and focus to them in 2024.
I am so grateful and I know that that will pay off in spades as the years go by. One big takeaway from 2024 is that I said no a lot. There were so many things that I told myself I should want or I should simply was not willing to do. And that no really created the contours of my life in 2024. And what that made me feel was a lot of the time like, why am I just a no? Why am I a no? Where's the yes, but the no makes way for the yes. If you don't know what you want, the next best thing is knowing what you do not want. And there was so much I did not want to do and that I was not willing to do in 2024. And wow, how big and meaningful is that? I led with no.
And, you know, it's funny, I look back on my life and I think about the fact that I was never able to get good grades in high school, in anything I was not interested in. And everything I was interested in, I got an A in. I am going to deliver the goods. If I am a yes, I am going to show up for a relationship if I am a yes. If I am a no, I can't do it. I don't want to. I really. I think that ultimately that is the way that I am designed to live. When I got to college and I could choose all the classes I wanted to take, I got straight A's.
That for me to follow the things that my gut and my intuition tells me are a yes and to politely pass on the things that are a no and to sort of take as neutral the things where it's not one or the other and go, okay, well, I guess I just sit with that one. I sit with that thing in the middle. I was trained as a child to override my intuition. I was in unmanageable situations as a child that in order to get through them, I needed to go along to get along. And unfortunately, what that created in me was a willingness to override my own no, which got me into a marriage where I was really, really talented at overriding my own intuition. And what I am committed to for the rest of my life, and I'm saying it out loud because I hope this will resonate with you, is to live by my intuition and to not override my own no. You know, in 2024, I spent a lot of time not overriding my no.
And in 2025, I'm going to be even better at that. Where are you overriding your no? Where does your body and your gut tell you that you are a no to something and you disregard that? What would happen if you let that be your compass? The clearer you are about a no, the louder the yeses will be. I am so excited to check in with myself in every possible instance in 2025 and ask my gut what I am supposed to do and not do. And if it gives me no information, great. I can either proceed or take no action. And if it gives me a no. Thank you for the no. And if it gives me a hell yes.
That's what I'm looking for. That's what I want. I want the hell yes. I want to be a hell yes to the things that are coming to my life in 2025. Look, I'm getting emotional about it because I want the hell yes for you so badly. I want you to listen for the hell yes alongside me. I hope this resonates with you. May your 2025 be packed with no's that you pay attention to and hell yeses that inspire you to take action toward a life that you cannot wait to live every single day. Ladies, we are going to live a long ass time. 40 is just the beginning. Okay, wiping away my tears. I am wiping away my tears of evangelism and passion for what is possible for us in the second half of our lives. May your 2025 be truly Hotter Than Ever.
Thanks for listening to Hotter Than Ever. If you loved this conversation, please tell the people that you love about it. Please share this episode with them. Maybe they need a little dose of hell yes in their lives for 2025. Maybe they need a little bit of hope that transformation and change and possibility is totally available when we stop lying and tell the truth about what it is that we really want and who we really want to be when we grow up.
Hotter Than Ever is produced by Erica Gerard and Podkit Productions. Our associate producer is Melody Carey. Music is by Chris Keating with vocals by Issa Fernandez.
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