How are you holding up? Sometimes, especially during this time of year, we expect ourselves to be superhuman. We want to cook the best meals, be the best hosts, get everything checked off of our list, plan our next year, wrap all of our gifts, and do it all absolutely perfectly. We want everything to go just as we planned. We push ourselves to the limit to make sure this happens, and we crumble when things go wrong. Are you feeling some of this pressure right now?

I definitely am. For those of you who follow this blog, you may have noticed that my posting in the past couple of months has gotten more and more infrequent. If I’m being completely honest about it, this really bothers me. I don’t want to have to admit that I can’t do it all. I thought that I would be able to write every day and get through the busy holiday season with my gift business. But guess what I’m realizing? I’m human. I have 24 hours in the day just like everyone else – and even if I stay up until 4 or 5 in the morning making and packing orders (it’s true), I still couldn’t catch up enough to where I could also write. It was a huge wake-up call for me, which is why I wrote the Are You In? post last week. I now know that I can’t do both – the gift business and writing. So I’m choosing to write and saying goodbye to the business.

Because of all of this superhuman pushing, Dan and I both got sick. But we knew that we couldn’t take time off – not when there were hundreds of orders to make and ship. So we continued to push.

Our dear friends were scheduled to arrive, and I still wasn’t well. And still we pushed to get the house ready for them.

I thought we were doing a great job of keeping up with it all – orders were going out, we were getting healthier, and our friends were here. And then they opened the microwave to make some tea. My worst fear was realized – we forgot to clean out the tapioca explosion that had occurred. I felt mortified and guess what? Human. My skeletons were exposed – I wasn’t perfect. I was just getting by. I had pushed myself as far as I could go. The house wasn’t immaculate. I wasn’t writing every day. I wasn’t taking care of myself. I was human.

And you know what? It’s okay.

Our friends laughed about the microwave and asked if they could help us catch up with the orders. They embraced our humanness because they love us, and we do the same with them. The challenge is to be able to turn this love and acceptance onto ourselves.

I am human, and so are you. And while I know that we know this in our heads, remembering this at all moments can sometimes be challenging, especially during this time of year.

And so over the next few days when you are celebrating the season and spending time with your family, please remember this. It’s okay if the casserole doesn’t turn out like you had hoped. It’s okay if the gift that you brought for your sister arrived broken. It’s all okay. Take some time to accept and embrace your humanness. And then embrace this in everyone you come across. This is a good thing. We aren’t machines. We aren’t programmed to be perfect. That’s the beauty of being human. We get to make mistakes and learn from them. We get to cut ourselves some slack. We get to enjoy life and laugh about all of this.

So thank you for accepting my humanness, and thank you for embracing your own.

Happy holidays to you! I am so grateful to have connected with you this year. Thank you for opening up, being authentic, and allowing this journey to unfold together. My heart is so much fuller because you are in it. I can’t wait to see what 2012 brings for all of us! ♥

P.S. – For those of you who are leaping with me, I have some fun things planned in the new year to help us do exactly that!

P.P.S. – It’s a huge honor to be the featured blogger in the Jan/Feb issue of Whole Living magazine! If you subscribe, be sure to check out page 8 when your issue arrives!