Hello, friends. I’m your host, Crys Cain. I’m going to apologize first off if the audio is a little weird. I’m recording in the middle of the day, which I try not to do because houses in Costa Rica don’t have insulation. All we have are windows with screens in them. Because air flow is more important than sound proofing.

We don’t have AC or heating, and my neighbors can be rather loud. Lawn work and yelling and talking, dropping things. So I am using Krisp.ai, which I totally signed up as an affiliate for because I planned on mentioning it today. It’s really good for phone calls, Zoom calls, anything you do from your computer.

It does some voodoo magic on the back end between your microphone and your recording system and kind of filters out some of that background noise, but it does also kind of mute the voice a little. So this may sound a little different from other weeks.

I have skipped—I have purposely not looked to see how many weeks I have skipped a few weeks. And the reasons for that were… I did really good. I recorded a few interviews ahead of time, and then I slacked off and I got to a week where I didn’t have an interview and I meant to record a solo episode, but then my electricity went out and there was a storm. And by time the electricity came back on so that I could possibly record, I was exhausted.

Next week ended up having my kid unexpectedly. I let a lot of things get in the way by putting off recording until the last minute. And then I just let it go several weeks. I think it’s been over a month. And I was starting to feel down on myself. Because the longer you let something go, the more guilty you feel about it, the less you want to think about it.

And then I realized that part of my resistance was that I didn’t have social energy. I was being quiet in my Slack groups. I wasn’t WhatsApping my friends as often, and I just did not want to expend what little energy I had on scheduling interviews and then having the interviews.

Well, if that’s the problem, I have to change the format of the podcast if I want to continue it. So I had three choices, three options.

* I could force myself to get back on the wagon. I could continue the format, but risk burning out, spending energy I didn’t have.* I could change the format and continue my personal momentum, but risk weakening what I was trying to build with the podcast originally.* I could just stop podcasting.

None of these would be terrible choices. The common knowledge best choice would be to, buck up buttercup, get some interviews in, keep on keeping on. But that didn’t feel like the right choice for me.

By changing up what I was doing in each podcast episode, I am trading the consistency of my time for the consistency of the content. I still want to do interviews, but I’m not going to pressure myself to make them happen.

There’s a lot of things going on in my personal life separation, divorce—that is a giant mental and emotional drain, whether you are thinking on it or not actively, The COVID second wave is hitting Costa Rica, and so there’s a lot of concerns with that. We started to open up quite a bit. We’ve been able to go out and eat at restaurants. My little area has had zero cases of COVID. We’ve been very lucky, but a lot of out-of-towners have been coming in from the city. And there’s some areas that are getting really bad. There’s this uncertainty about when it will stop being safe down here. All of that is filling my subconscious.

I made the choice to do a solo episode. And then of course I have procrastinated probably over a week on t...