The part where y’all talked about death and all hit so close to home. I lost my mom on 6/26/2025 and it was honestly a peaceful reminder that death is always around us regardless of who we are and where we are at.
Thank you to the entire PP team for being consistent in what y’all do because I may not have known how I was going to tell my girls that their nana passed away, but I knew I had y’all in my feed Friday morning ❤️❤️🩹
I’m so sorry for your loss, Charlotte. You and your family are in my prayers. And, it’s so true that this community is a life giving space in so many of our lives.
This was the year I started listening, though not until after the Jen Hatmaker/Beto episode, so at the very end of the year. In addition to the Kavanaugh hearings, what I remember most was the PA Grand Jury report released about sexual assault in the Catholic Church. I was a year out of divinity school, working in a parish in Boston, and mostly trusted that this was something that had been learned from through the crisis in Boston.
When I saw how much coverup was STILL happening, and how much hadn't been learned from, something broke inside of me in a very before/after moment. Fool me once, fool me twice type of situation. While I wasn't directly asked to defend the Catholic Church in my work, I was working *for* the church and I couldn't square that. I was also dating someone somewhat more conservative than I was, who came from a different Christian tradition, and we had a LOT of tough conversations navigating all of the year's headlines.
7 years later, I'm working in a very different form of ministry that allows me space to explore and question my own faith. Only this spring did I feel a desire to return to a specific parish I never stopped loving after being mostly away for 5 years. All of my concerns are still there, but I needed a space that was bigger than myself in order to find courage and a moral compass in this #*@! administration, so I've set my desire for ideological purity on this one aside for now.
I came to this episode late because I knew it was going to be hard for me. I know #MeToo started before this, but I didn't consider myself a victim of #MeToo at that time. Then in 2018 I heard Christine Blassy Ford's story, and man. It brought back an incident. For me it happened in college, but I recognized that whole story. There are key differences. The first key difference is I never learned the name of the guy who did what he did to me. The second is I did tell a few people. So I could say to my sister and my husband "do you remember my story" and they knew exactly what I was talking about. My theory on Brent Kavanaugh is not pretty. I think he wasn't lying when he said he didn't remember this. (He was lying when he answered the question what is a devil's triangle.) He didn't remember it because it was not memorable to him. It was him and his friend horsing around like they usually did. They didn't consider that they were terrifying the girl.
The weekend they confirmed Brett Kavanaugh, I happened to start reading "Us Against You" by Fredrick Backman. It is the sequel to Beartown. If you've never read either, please read them now. In one of the introductory paragraphs to Us Against You, it says has this paragraph that I read the weekend they confirmed Brett Kavanaugh. I read it and I wept a little. And then I went back and read it again. And I wept a little more. And I eventually typed it up because man, this paragraph. What a thing.
"There's a story about us before this one, and we're always going to carry the guilt of that. Sometimes good people do terrible things in the belief that they're trying to protect what they love. A boy, the star of the hockey team, raped a girl. And we lost our way. A community is the sum of its choices, and when two of our children said different things, we believed him. Because that was easier, because if the girl was lying our lives could carry on as usual. When we found out the truth, we fell apart, taking the town with us. It's easy to say that we should have done everything differently, but perhaps you wouldn't have acted differently either. If you'd been afraid, if you'd been forced to pick a side, if you'd known what you had to sacrifice. Perhaps you wouldn't be as brave as you think. Perhaps you're not as different from us as you hope."
There is a lot in this episode, but I am stuck on Sarah being accused of cheating during a debate. I know I was a listener in 2018, but I am not sure if I was a Patreon supporter. Now I am super curious to hear this story!
Oh wow that conversation about Anthony Bourdain caught me off guard. I remember his death viscerally. My husband is a chef and had a restaurant for almost a decade (we just closed it last summer) and I remember the day Anthony Bourdain died. The food community rallied. Derek (my husband) received so many texts from other food industry people checking in to see if he was ok and he did the same for others. There has always been a dark undercurrent to the restaurant/hospitality world but it’s also a community that cares for each other deeply. Phew, you took me on a journey there. Thank you for honoring him. 💔
2018 was when one of my friendships started to fray because I said I had no interest in celebrating the 4th of July when our country was tearing families apart at the border. This “friend” called me in 2020 after Biden won to bring this topic back up and I still stood by it. I was ashamed to be an American for the first time that summer.
I feel this. When Trump won in 2016, my formerly patriotic husband got rid of ALL of his USA-related t-shirts. We've been pretty ambivalent about celebrating the 4th since then, especially with my extended family who are Trump supporters and who have historically hosted the family 4th of July celebration. They invited us this week and I declined. We haven't gone since before Covid. Now we keep things pretty low-key, maybe a parade if the kids feel like it, but mostly just cook out at home and chill.
I feel this so much this year, I just can’t celebrate the 4th. So I planned a camping trip and we will focus on this beautiful world I’m grateful to live in
My oldest son turned one the day before Justice Kavanaugh was confirmed and I remember sobbing uncontrollably on my commute after I found out, thinking how I had no freaking clue how to raise a son in this culture. As distraught as I was, I sobbed harder for his female peers, though, because I thought we’d made more progress during the MeToo movement. I attended one of the many all-girls Catholic prep schools in the DC area. I went to Georgetown Prep’s (Kavanaugh’s alma mater) prom. I didn’t have a negative experience, but my good friend was assaulted by a Prep student, her boyfriend at the time. It hit so close to home. It brought me back to my two years working in the Washington Commanders finance department in my mid-20s and the misogyny I dealt with, which was far milder than my female colleagues in the marketing and sponsorship departments, let alone the cheerleaders. Kavanaugh’s confirmation was my breaking point politically and I started to become more involved politically. I walked miles and miles and miles with my son in a hiking backpack, canvassing the neighborhoods in my purple northern VA district between his confirmation and Election Day. My husband offered to keep him home to make the miles easier while I canvassed, but I declined. I wanted my son to be part of that movement, and even if he has no memories of it, I believe those miles of canvassing in 2018 are deep in his bones and helping to shape him into a young man who will respect and honor women. My district elected Rep. Jennifer Wexton, unseating a conservative, and seeing her win on Election Day, along with Abigail Spanberger and other strong women, was a small dose of redemption. It was hard listening to this episode and I cried through Sarah’s reading of her blog post which I remembered so vividly. Pantsuit Politics made me feel a little less alone during that incredibly challenging period.
This was a hard one for me. The Kavanaugh hearings were the last straw for me with the local Catholic Church. We left one parish in 2016 after a beloved priest left the priesthood because he wanted to eventually have a family of his own. At the new parish, a great priest had a stroke a few months into our time there, and his replacement did not align with my views of the faith.
The final straw was a homily about how we needed to support Kavanaugh and trust our leaders without ever saying exact names or parties because can’t risk that tax exempt status! But it was crystal clear. I stormed out and only went back twice for my then 2nd grader to receive his sacraments that year since he was over halfway through the process.
I miss the community of church, the singing in a group of people, the ritual, but the priests at the couple of local parishes are not voices I want in my boys’ heads at this point. I was surprised how emotional this episode and going back to that time made me today.
2018 was also the year of the viral tweet “Every woman I know has been storing anger for years in her body, and it's starting to feel like bees are going to pour out of all of our mouths at the same time." I just got a tattoo of a bee on my arm to remind me of the power of my anger. I am still so angry about Kavanaugh and how Dr. Ford was treated and all the justifications for sexual abuse thrown around cavalierly. And I think one of the works of my lifetime is going to be learning how to direct the bees that want to come pouring out of my mouth.
The Kavanaugh hearings happened during the fall semester of my junior year of college. The day that he was confirmed, I had my honors justice seminar, taught by a beloved philosophy professor. She began the class by saying that she wanted to acknowledge the confirmation and provide space for us to process whatever we were feeling. She said to be gentle in whatever we said, as there were undoubtedly survivors of sexual violence in that room, one of which was her. That gesture of creating space and sharing some vulnerability has stuck with me as one of the most powerful educational experiences I have had.
Oof this was the hardest one to listen to, actually had to pause for awhile when you mentioned speaking about BK (insert extremly angry emojis here).
I still miss Anthony Bourdain. I was a fan of his since the early 00's on the food network. I always loved how much he respected other cultures and would never say "no" to any kind of food put infront of him. Always gracious. Just an amazing person and of coruse so funny and intelligent.
I've worked for a rape crisis center for 29 years, and one of my biggest memories of 2018 is that we had to hire more people to answer our hotline during the BK hearings. Soooo many distressed callers!
2018 was a shitshow. In addition to the Kavanaugh trauma, I was getting divorced. My cat died. I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I had the brain tumor (mostly) removed. I spent months recovering. My parents died. Then it was over.
2018 was a bananas year for my personally and part of that makes a lot more sense after hearing this year in review. 2018 contained part of my junior and senior years in college, an internship in DC, my brother getting married(I’ll adore my now SIL, it was just a big transition for our family) , and my parents moving out of my childhood home to a new state 12 hours away. (The wedding and the actual move took place within 2 weeks of each other, which I do not advise). When I went back to school in the fall of 2018 I quickly fell into depression. I was taking ceramics that semester and it was one of the only things that felt doable to me. I could hardly write and thankfully had some very gracious professors. When I couldn’t do much else, I could go to the studio and work on my pottery. Everything felt so out of control in my life and world, but I could (sometimes 😜) control the clay.
I’m sure many of the hours I spent down in the studio I was listening to Sarah and Beth. As young women trying to figure out what I believe at a pretty conservative university in central Kentucky, I so valued hearing your voices (and still do!).
I started listening like many of us, after Jen Hatmaker had you on her show to talk about Beto. So 2018 was the year! Endlessly grateful for your influence since then, and the way you have processed so many hard things together on the podcast. <3
I wasn't yet listening to you regularly during 2018, but this episode took me directly back to a core memory of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Our family was at my husband's parents' house watching a football game and Kavanaugh came up. His very conservative (and Christian!) parents and siblings were brushing off the accusations, giving the "boys will be boys" and "everyone was probably drinking" defense. I'm usually pretty quiet and pleasant at these gatherings, but I was LIVID. I have two sons who were 12 and 9 at the time. I finally exploded at them (not the right response, but you hadn't published I Think You're Wrong But I'm Listening!) I basically said "By providing these excuses, you're justifying assault! My boys are here, listening to this conversation. I don't want my boys hearing these excuses! I don't want them to think it's ever OK to take advantage of a woman or girl, even if someone has been drinking or made bad decisions or hasn't matured." It shut down the conversation but I don't think I changed anyone's mind. I don't know if he should have been confirmed, but I'm still sick about the way Ford was treated and the way conservatives who promoted family values during the Bill Clinton scandal did such an about face with Kavanagh, the Access Hollywood tapes, and so many other situations during the current Trump era.
I remember going out to lunch with my parents and aunt and uncle and really getting into it about the Kavanaugh hearings. Weirdly, it was in the middle of a heated discussion that my aunt said I love you to each other which is the only time I remember doing that.
The part where y’all talked about death and all hit so close to home. I lost my mom on 6/26/2025 and it was honestly a peaceful reminder that death is always around us regardless of who we are and where we are at.
Thank you to the entire PP team for being consistent in what y’all do because I may not have known how I was going to tell my girls that their nana passed away, but I knew I had y’all in my feed Friday morning ❤️❤️🩹
I’m so sorry for your loss, Charlotte. You and your family are in my prayers. And, it’s so true that this community is a life giving space in so many of our lives.
This was the year I started listening, though not until after the Jen Hatmaker/Beto episode, so at the very end of the year. In addition to the Kavanaugh hearings, what I remember most was the PA Grand Jury report released about sexual assault in the Catholic Church. I was a year out of divinity school, working in a parish in Boston, and mostly trusted that this was something that had been learned from through the crisis in Boston.
When I saw how much coverup was STILL happening, and how much hadn't been learned from, something broke inside of me in a very before/after moment. Fool me once, fool me twice type of situation. While I wasn't directly asked to defend the Catholic Church in my work, I was working *for* the church and I couldn't square that. I was also dating someone somewhat more conservative than I was, who came from a different Christian tradition, and we had a LOT of tough conversations navigating all of the year's headlines.
7 years later, I'm working in a very different form of ministry that allows me space to explore and question my own faith. Only this spring did I feel a desire to return to a specific parish I never stopped loving after being mostly away for 5 years. All of my concerns are still there, but I needed a space that was bigger than myself in order to find courage and a moral compass in this #*@! administration, so I've set my desire for ideological purity on this one aside for now.
All this to say, this episode brought up a lot.
I came to this episode late because I knew it was going to be hard for me. I know #MeToo started before this, but I didn't consider myself a victim of #MeToo at that time. Then in 2018 I heard Christine Blassy Ford's story, and man. It brought back an incident. For me it happened in college, but I recognized that whole story. There are key differences. The first key difference is I never learned the name of the guy who did what he did to me. The second is I did tell a few people. So I could say to my sister and my husband "do you remember my story" and they knew exactly what I was talking about. My theory on Brent Kavanaugh is not pretty. I think he wasn't lying when he said he didn't remember this. (He was lying when he answered the question what is a devil's triangle.) He didn't remember it because it was not memorable to him. It was him and his friend horsing around like they usually did. They didn't consider that they were terrifying the girl.
The weekend they confirmed Brett Kavanaugh, I happened to start reading "Us Against You" by Fredrick Backman. It is the sequel to Beartown. If you've never read either, please read them now. In one of the introductory paragraphs to Us Against You, it says has this paragraph that I read the weekend they confirmed Brett Kavanaugh. I read it and I wept a little. And then I went back and read it again. And I wept a little more. And I eventually typed it up because man, this paragraph. What a thing.
"There's a story about us before this one, and we're always going to carry the guilt of that. Sometimes good people do terrible things in the belief that they're trying to protect what they love. A boy, the star of the hockey team, raped a girl. And we lost our way. A community is the sum of its choices, and when two of our children said different things, we believed him. Because that was easier, because if the girl was lying our lives could carry on as usual. When we found out the truth, we fell apart, taking the town with us. It's easy to say that we should have done everything differently, but perhaps you wouldn't have acted differently either. If you'd been afraid, if you'd been forced to pick a side, if you'd known what you had to sacrifice. Perhaps you wouldn't be as brave as you think. Perhaps you're not as different from us as you hope."
Yes those books are so so powerful.
There is a lot in this episode, but I am stuck on Sarah being accused of cheating during a debate. I know I was a listener in 2018, but I am not sure if I was a Patreon supporter. Now I am super curious to hear this story!
Oh wow that conversation about Anthony Bourdain caught me off guard. I remember his death viscerally. My husband is a chef and had a restaurant for almost a decade (we just closed it last summer) and I remember the day Anthony Bourdain died. The food community rallied. Derek (my husband) received so many texts from other food industry people checking in to see if he was ok and he did the same for others. There has always been a dark undercurrent to the restaurant/hospitality world but it’s also a community that cares for each other deeply. Phew, you took me on a journey there. Thank you for honoring him. 💔
2018 was when one of my friendships started to fray because I said I had no interest in celebrating the 4th of July when our country was tearing families apart at the border. This “friend” called me in 2020 after Biden won to bring this topic back up and I still stood by it. I was ashamed to be an American for the first time that summer.
I feel this. When Trump won in 2016, my formerly patriotic husband got rid of ALL of his USA-related t-shirts. We've been pretty ambivalent about celebrating the 4th since then, especially with my extended family who are Trump supporters and who have historically hosted the family 4th of July celebration. They invited us this week and I declined. We haven't gone since before Covid. Now we keep things pretty low-key, maybe a parade if the kids feel like it, but mostly just cook out at home and chill.
I feel this so much this year, I just can’t celebrate the 4th. So I planned a camping trip and we will focus on this beautiful world I’m grateful to live in
My oldest son turned one the day before Justice Kavanaugh was confirmed and I remember sobbing uncontrollably on my commute after I found out, thinking how I had no freaking clue how to raise a son in this culture. As distraught as I was, I sobbed harder for his female peers, though, because I thought we’d made more progress during the MeToo movement. I attended one of the many all-girls Catholic prep schools in the DC area. I went to Georgetown Prep’s (Kavanaugh’s alma mater) prom. I didn’t have a negative experience, but my good friend was assaulted by a Prep student, her boyfriend at the time. It hit so close to home. It brought me back to my two years working in the Washington Commanders finance department in my mid-20s and the misogyny I dealt with, which was far milder than my female colleagues in the marketing and sponsorship departments, let alone the cheerleaders. Kavanaugh’s confirmation was my breaking point politically and I started to become more involved politically. I walked miles and miles and miles with my son in a hiking backpack, canvassing the neighborhoods in my purple northern VA district between his confirmation and Election Day. My husband offered to keep him home to make the miles easier while I canvassed, but I declined. I wanted my son to be part of that movement, and even if he has no memories of it, I believe those miles of canvassing in 2018 are deep in his bones and helping to shape him into a young man who will respect and honor women. My district elected Rep. Jennifer Wexton, unseating a conservative, and seeing her win on Election Day, along with Abigail Spanberger and other strong women, was a small dose of redemption. It was hard listening to this episode and I cried through Sarah’s reading of her blog post which I remembered so vividly. Pantsuit Politics made me feel a little less alone during that incredibly challenging period.
This was a hard one for me. The Kavanaugh hearings were the last straw for me with the local Catholic Church. We left one parish in 2016 after a beloved priest left the priesthood because he wanted to eventually have a family of his own. At the new parish, a great priest had a stroke a few months into our time there, and his replacement did not align with my views of the faith.
The final straw was a homily about how we needed to support Kavanaugh and trust our leaders without ever saying exact names or parties because can’t risk that tax exempt status! But it was crystal clear. I stormed out and only went back twice for my then 2nd grader to receive his sacraments that year since he was over halfway through the process.
I miss the community of church, the singing in a group of people, the ritual, but the priests at the couple of local parishes are not voices I want in my boys’ heads at this point. I was surprised how emotional this episode and going back to that time made me today.
2018 was also the year of the viral tweet “Every woman I know has been storing anger for years in her body, and it's starting to feel like bees are going to pour out of all of our mouths at the same time." I just got a tattoo of a bee on my arm to remind me of the power of my anger. I am still so angry about Kavanaugh and how Dr. Ford was treated and all the justifications for sexual abuse thrown around cavalierly. And I think one of the works of my lifetime is going to be learning how to direct the bees that want to come pouring out of my mouth.
The Kavanaugh hearings happened during the fall semester of my junior year of college. The day that he was confirmed, I had my honors justice seminar, taught by a beloved philosophy professor. She began the class by saying that she wanted to acknowledge the confirmation and provide space for us to process whatever we were feeling. She said to be gentle in whatever we said, as there were undoubtedly survivors of sexual violence in that room, one of which was her. That gesture of creating space and sharing some vulnerability has stuck with me as one of the most powerful educational experiences I have had.
Oof this was the hardest one to listen to, actually had to pause for awhile when you mentioned speaking about BK (insert extremly angry emojis here).
I still miss Anthony Bourdain. I was a fan of his since the early 00's on the food network. I always loved how much he respected other cultures and would never say "no" to any kind of food put infront of him. Always gracious. Just an amazing person and of coruse so funny and intelligent.
I've worked for a rape crisis center for 29 years, and one of my biggest memories of 2018 is that we had to hire more people to answer our hotline during the BK hearings. Soooo many distressed callers!
2018 was a shitshow. In addition to the Kavanaugh trauma, I was getting divorced. My cat died. I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I had the brain tumor (mostly) removed. I spent months recovering. My parents died. Then it was over.
Oh wow. That is so hard. I've had years like that. They suck. Let's hope that was the worst of it.
I’m so sorry, I hope that you never have to overcome another year like that one
Oh, gosh. I am sorry. That was a lot. Glad you are here with us now!
2018 was a bananas year for my personally and part of that makes a lot more sense after hearing this year in review. 2018 contained part of my junior and senior years in college, an internship in DC, my brother getting married(I’ll adore my now SIL, it was just a big transition for our family) , and my parents moving out of my childhood home to a new state 12 hours away. (The wedding and the actual move took place within 2 weeks of each other, which I do not advise). When I went back to school in the fall of 2018 I quickly fell into depression. I was taking ceramics that semester and it was one of the only things that felt doable to me. I could hardly write and thankfully had some very gracious professors. When I couldn’t do much else, I could go to the studio and work on my pottery. Everything felt so out of control in my life and world, but I could (sometimes 😜) control the clay.
I’m sure many of the hours I spent down in the studio I was listening to Sarah and Beth. As young women trying to figure out what I believe at a pretty conservative university in central Kentucky, I so valued hearing your voices (and still do!).
I started listening like many of us, after Jen Hatmaker had you on her show to talk about Beto. So 2018 was the year! Endlessly grateful for your influence since then, and the way you have processed so many hard things together on the podcast. <3
I wasn't yet listening to you regularly during 2018, but this episode took me directly back to a core memory of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Our family was at my husband's parents' house watching a football game and Kavanaugh came up. His very conservative (and Christian!) parents and siblings were brushing off the accusations, giving the "boys will be boys" and "everyone was probably drinking" defense. I'm usually pretty quiet and pleasant at these gatherings, but I was LIVID. I have two sons who were 12 and 9 at the time. I finally exploded at them (not the right response, but you hadn't published I Think You're Wrong But I'm Listening!) I basically said "By providing these excuses, you're justifying assault! My boys are here, listening to this conversation. I don't want my boys hearing these excuses! I don't want them to think it's ever OK to take advantage of a woman or girl, even if someone has been drinking or made bad decisions or hasn't matured." It shut down the conversation but I don't think I changed anyone's mind. I don't know if he should have been confirmed, but I'm still sick about the way Ford was treated and the way conservatives who promoted family values during the Bill Clinton scandal did such an about face with Kavanagh, the Access Hollywood tapes, and so many other situations during the current Trump era.
I remember going out to lunch with my parents and aunt and uncle and really getting into it about the Kavanaugh hearings. Weirdly, it was in the middle of a heated discussion that my aunt said I love you to each other which is the only time I remember doing that.