It has been a week. If you have been keeping up with my Instagram, you may have seen some of that.

I wrote, “if there’s ever a week that screamed, you’re an adult, it’s this week.” 

Typically I pride myself with having it all together.

But this past week, I was taking care of a lot of things. My mom landed in the hospital for over a week, and Carmen our aussiedoodle puppy had her first trip to the VET ER. There were a lot of moving parts between my mom being in the hospital and advocating for her with the doctors and understanding what was going on as well as running my dog to the vet multiple times, including the ER visit. Meanwhile, my kids were still doing the things that they needed to do including Jersey having her first major movie shoot. Physically and emotionally, this week was a big test. And I was feeling really exhausted.

I actually got a lot of comments about that when I posted it so I wanted to explore that a bit more here.

When life happens, I know that the hardest part is to allow yourself to slow down. And also- to ask for help. 

Amid everything with my mom and dog, life didn’t stop. I still had to be a mom. I still had to pick up my kids from school and take them to baseball, and dance, and to all the things. So when you’re already busy, you just have to try to figure out how to manage it. And sometimes… you reach capacity.

I’m sharing this not because I want sympathy for my week but to be very real with you about how life goes sometimes. Despite what we think we see all around us, and especially in contrast to what we see on social media, life isn’t all making movies and fun Halloween parties. Sometimes life is really hard. And I did have times this week when I literally rolled myself into a ball on my couch with a blanket and just closed my eyes…and rested.

That night, I texted John and told him that I was at full capacity. I couldn’t take Jersey to dance so he had to take her there and pick her up. I never do that but I did that last week. I’m usually always saying, “I got it.” But I didn’t have it anymore. So John was there for me to take her and I literally laid on my couch during that time. I didn’t even pretend to be busy. I just knew that I couldn’t go out. I knew I couldn’t do one more thing that day. And I knew mentally I just needed to just stop moving for a little bit of time.

When you just give and give and give, and you don’t replenish and charge your battery, you lose battery. And then you’re out of battery. You know the old adage. “You can’t pour from an empty cup.” And my cup? It was so empty. It wasn’t surprising that that night, I needed to just lay here and not do anything for anyone. That was me doing something for myself. And I really think that is self-awareness in a nutshell. Allow yourself to slow down and stop before it is dangerous. You could literally make yourself sick or have a panic attack if you don’t check in on yourself and give yourself that permission to slow down or even stop for a beat.

Luckily, I have a lot of self-awareness. I’m not trying to be a superwoman over here. I’m going to do what I can do, but there’s a limit, that point you reach as a human when you realize that you could break down at any second with all the things on your plate. So to prevent that from happening, I allowed myself to just curl up in a ball on my couch, under a comfy blanket, and breathe through it. And the next day, I cleared time to go to yoga, even though I could have gone to the hospital right away that morning. I really needed time for myself to clear my mind. 

I do believe you need to give yourself permission to slow down and check out. If everything else can be handled in your life by accepting help, do that. Do not feel guilty and realize that is also mental health, which is important. When taking care of everyone, there are times in life when you have to take care of yourself, accept help, and not feel bad about it. Sometimes that person who is always offering help to everyone else also sometimes is the one in need of help. 

This week I accepted a lot of help. I knew I needed it. Friends reached out to me and offered support and help. And I appreciated those people coming over and offering their help or checking in on my mom for me and going to check on my dog if I also needed to be somewhere else. I felt really supported this week. They knew that as much as I pride myself on “having it all together,” maybe this week I didn’t have it together quite as much. And I don’t have too much pride to not allow help in.

I also could have skipped Halloween amid everything that was going on but for me Halloween was also a bit of therapy. Halloween is my favorite holiday. I love everything about it. I love dressing up as something that you’re not. I love the community aspect of it. I love the candy and the happiness that surrounds the tradition of complete strangers offering something to you.

I have to say, Halloween weekend really helped me during a time when I was really feeling at max capacity of adult life. To be honest, I did have a background headache throughout the entire Halloween weekend but I fully committed anyway to it because I love the occasion so much. It was a bit of an outlet for me to just zone out of my life and be in the scary clown makeup world for a second. Helping Jersey with her make-up and then focusing on my own makeup was sort of like the secret sauce for getting through to another week. It allowed me to just tune everything out and move through things that brought me so much happiness.

I wrote this today to help shed even more light on the fact that even the most “together” people sometimes struggle to have it together. I’m not trying to paint this perfect picture that my life is only filled with bowling events, baseball practices, fun dinners, making movies, and Halloween parties. The reality is that there’s a lot of things in between and I’m not ashamed of them. Life stuff just happens.

And this week, especially in those moments when I was able to take a time out when I let help in, I realized how grateful I am for all that I do have. Sometimes it’s all in the way that you view it.  You can feel bad for yourself for all that is happening or you can be grateful for anything you do have. Breathing through it in a yoga space definitely helps with that kind of perspective.

So, how do you manage when life happens, when things are thrown at you that you weren’t planning? I’m here to remind you that when life happens, give yourself that permission for a time-out. Unapologetically.