Hot Flash Files: After Dark

Midlife changes more than hormones — it shifts identity, intimacy, energy, and confidence. In this episode of Bloom from the Broken, Aussprey speaks directly to women navigating perimenopause, decreased sexual desire, exhaustion, and the tension between career and home life. This is not shame-based. This is not panic-driven. It’s grounded, honest, and steady. If you’ve been wondering whether somet...

Tonight’s episode feels a little different. I’ve been searching my heart about this one. We live in an age where pain is often managed instead of understood — where sorrow is medicated faster than it is explored. I take antidepressants. I have for decades. I need them. So this is not an anti-medication rant. It’s a layered conversation. In this episode, I talk about childhood trauma, nervous syste...

Christmas comes with twinkle lights, cinnamon, crowded stores, half-wrapped gifts, and the uncanny ability to make women feel like we’re supposed to pull off magic while running on two hours of sleep and one functioning adrenal gland. But beneath the chaos, beneath the glitter, beneath the performance, there’s a quieter story — one we forget even as we celebrate it. This special Christmas episode...

Welcome back to The Hot Flash Files: After Dark — where the lighting is dim, the hormones are loud, and the only thing hotter than our core temperature is our intolerance for nonsense. Tonight’s episode earns its medal in a category every woman over thirty-five should qualify for: The Mood Swing Olympics. If you’ve ever gone from “I love everyone” to “no one speak to me or I will start swinging” i...

Some women stay because everyone expects them to. Some women keep the job, keep the role, keep the persona—even when it’s draining the life right out of them. But every now and then, someone does the unthinkable. Someone looks at the biggest opportunity of her career, the thing everyone else swears they’d die for, and says… “Actually, no. I choose me.” Tonight on Hot Flash Files: After Dark , we’r...

Welcome back to The Hot Flash Files: After Dark , where we talk about the parts of womanhood nobody had the courage—or the good sense—to warn us about. In Episode Two , we dive headfirst into the slow-motion hormonal car crash lovingly known as Cougar Puberty … also known as Puberty 2.0 , The Midlife Reboot , or Why am I crying and also enraged and also craving nachos at 10 a.m.? If you thought th...

Welcome to the Hot Flash Files After Dark… the show where hormones are high, patience is low, and the thoughts we never admit to finally get their time in the spotlight. Tonight we are diving headfirst into intrusive thoughts… the call of the void… those sudden little brain flashes that show up out of nowhere and make you question whether you should be allowed in public without supervision. You kn...

Welcome to The Hot Flash Files: After Dark — where we celebrate the women history tried to silence, underestimate, or shove into a pretty little box… and then act shocked when those same women end up changing the entire world. Tonight, we’re talking about a woman who was so far ahead of her time, she basically lived in the twenty-first century while everyone around her was still wiping their mouth...

Welcome to Episode One of The Hot Flash Files: After Dark , where we kick this whole ride off with the menopausal dynamic duo nobody asked for but EVERY woman knows all too well: night sweats and day rage . If you’ve ever bolted awake at three in the morning lying in a puddle like you fell asleep in a sauna… this one’s for you. If you’ve ever felt your blood pressure skyrocket because someone brea...

Tonight’s After Dark episode takes us back to Christmas Eve in the year nineteen thirty-three, when a young red-haired woman stepped off a bus into the snowy streets of Willoughby, Ohio. She spoke to no one. She carried a small suitcase, wore a blue coat, and seemed to move with quiet purpose. She bought a ticket to Corry, Pennsylvania… but never boarded the bus. Instead, she left her belongings a...

Some women are remembered for who they were. Others for what they endured. But a rare few — the extraordinary few — are remembered for what they did when everyone else looked away. This episode tells the haunting, breathtaking story of Lila Hart , the woman the town tried to erase with whispers and nicknames. “The girl from Lantern Street.” “That woman.” “The red-door woman.” Labels meant to reduc...

Some shows don’t just entertain you — they reach out, tap you on the shoulder, and say quietly, I know what you’re carrying. That’s what happened when Michael and I started watching “The Beast in Me” on Netflix. I didn’t expect to see myself in the author’s character. But there she was — moving through her world gently disconnected, living at a distance from the people around her. Not because she...

Tonight’s After Dark story steps out of the Kansas dust and into the cold, quiet places where women remake their lives one impossible decision at a time. In the year 1879, Clara Mayfield lived a simple life stitched together with thread and hope. She spent her mornings sewing church dresses, listening for her father’s warm voice calling her “darlin’.” But when a railroad accident took him, everyth...

The long-awaited Wicked: Part Two is almost here, and in this episode we’re diving broom-first into the magic, the mayhem, and the deeper emotional punch of the sequel that has every theatre kid (and quite a few adults) counting sleeps until opening night. If you loved the first movie, buckle up: Part Two brings higher stakes, darker themes, and some of the most iconic musical moments ever written...

Most of us grew up hearing Mary had a little lamb as a sweet nursery rhyme, but almost no one knows that the story was real. Mary Sawyer was a real girl. She lived on a farm in Sterling, Massachusetts, and one cold morning in the early eighteen hundreds, she found a newborn lamb abandoned in the barn. The tiny creature was freezing. Its mother had rejected it. Mary did what tender hearted children...