Hi friends and welcome to the papaya podcast. I'm your hostess, Tryin Hermostess, Sarah Nicole,

and each week I'm going to be dishing out some sweetness mixed in with some seeds of wisdom

or something like that. So get ready to get inspired, get candid, get real, because we are all in this digital

space together. Welcome back. It has been a little while. I have gone on a bit of hiatus,

and I don't think I've done a solo podcast in a couple years.

So this feels like a good time to come back, reconnect, tell you what I'm thinking and feeling.

Because last year I wasn't sure if I wanted to stick with the podcast, which is a really

weird thing to say when you're nearing that 11 million download mark, which, thank you, by the way.

It's such an incredible, it's been such an incredible ride.

It's been such an incredible experience.

But that's not to say that it hasn't also been a little bit difficult.

It really, I think in the world of podcasting, it looks so simple.

And it looks like it's nothing sometimes because it looks really easy to pick up a microphone and talk. And in many circumstances,

it is, but not all of them. And something that I have really had to reflect on in the last year

is that what looks good on paper might not be feeling good inside.

And I always wanted to make sure that I was pursuing things not just because they're successful,

if that makes sense, because you have to feel good about it. And I wasn't feeling good about it. And I felt like I was almost, oh, it's another Monday. It's a podcast. Maybe recording on Mondays was not ideal, to be honest. I mean, Mondays are not great in general. But this thing that I hate about podcast is the exact same thing that I love about it. And I was thinking about it. Yes, I'm

going to talk about Jason Kelsey, but I was thinking about it after the Eagles game, which was a

devastating loss. And you see Jason clearly very, very emotional. And I'm thinking about

New Heights, their podcasts, which I love. And I'm thinking about the fact that I know that episode comes out on Wednesday, which means he's playing Monday night football. He's going to get a little night to recover. And then tomorrow he's going to hit the record button and he's going to have to talk about it. And in the very early stages of the podcast, he's like, I just want to shut myself in a room for a few days.

But yet, they still have the conversation. And this is what I mean when I say, it's the thing I love about it is the thing I hate about it too is because it's so raw.

There's no, like, yes, there's editing, but there's no, there's no removing emotion from it there's no removing when you're

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