Hello and welcome. My name is Mary and I'm the host of Prologs, a lifestyle podcast where each episode is like a digital

journal entry detailing whatever it is I'm going through in life at the moment. I talk about my

journey with mental health, relationships, wellness, beauty, personal development, and more.

So join me every Monday morning for a reminder that we're all still figuring out life for the first

time and you are still in the beginning of your personal story. Hello, welcome back to prologs. I've gotten tired of not

being back in the studio to record video, so I'm recording on my laptop tonight. It is a cozy

9.15 p.m. I just had a burrito for dinner and watched an episode of Castle. Matt just went to bed

because he has an early morning flight to the States tomorrow, and I'm here talking to you. First thing, as you can tell, because

this episode, last week's episode went up on Tuesdays. Perlogs now goes live on Tuesdays, just like

some housekeeping announcements to get out of the way. Perlogs is going live every Tuesday now.

I'm switching the upload schedule. Here's the thing. I never

actually liked the Monday upload schedule. In fact, I really didn't like it. I always ended up

working on Sunday nights to get the episodes finished. Sometimes I edit the podcast by myself and

sometimes someone edits them for me. But inevitably, whether it was me or somebody else,

it just always ended up happening

last minute. And trying to coordinate those final details on Sunday nights was just never easy. And I never liked the Monday uploads. And when I did the podcast rebrand last year, I wanted to switch the upload day. But a lot of people were like, oh, we like it going live on a Monday. So I kept it on a Monday. But the podcast went live Tuesday last week because of Labor Day, and unfortunately, it was just so much easier, so much easier I can't even explain. So I've made the decision. I'm switching to a Tuesday. I'm sorry if you really like the Monday upload schedule. This just works a lot better for me. Hopefully, we all just get used to it and it's fine. But yes, formal announcement in case you missed me talking about on Instagram, Prologs

goes live every Tuesday now. I don't have a standard upload time when I, or before I moved to the UK,

I liked to have it go live like first thing in the morning East Coast time, but now I don't know what to

do. I'm five hours ahead of the East Coast, eight hours ahead of L.A.

Not just L.A. The West Coast. You know what I mean? And so I just never know when to have it go live. I don't want to have it go live too late in the morning in the UK for the girls in the UK who like to listen to it, you know, on their right to work in the morning or whatever. but then I've noticed because the majority of the prologues listenership is in the U is in the U.S.

If no one from the U.S. listens to the podcast in the first couple hours that it's live because they're asleep because it's the middle of the night, the podcast's views get suppressed. And I've tested this out. I've tried different times. It's just a weird thing in the algorithm. And I don't want the episodes to get suppressed, but I also don't want to be uploading them like really late in the day for the UK or European listenership. I don't really know what time to do. That's still something I'm figuring out. But anyway, going live every Tuesday. And yes, that's my, that's my announcement today. Today's episode, I wanted to talk about being intentionally child free. This might be a shorter episode than usual. It's kind of in the line of my free-write episodes where I just brain dump and ramble about a topic that's top of mind for me. I just want to talk about being intentionally child-free as a woman. I'm 27, so I'm in my mid to late 20s. And I talk about being child-free in my content sometimes. And I always get really mixed reactions. A lot of the times it's positive. People appreciate me talking about it. But I do get negative comments and backlash every single time I post about it. And I just wanted to talk about it today because I think that more women who are intentionally child free should feel open about talking about that choice.

Because I think when it comes to the decision to have children or not have children, it's so

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