This Week Got Away From Me

On busyness, grace, and peanut butter pretzels as a food group

I had plans.
Big ones, even.

I was going to write more, run more. Sleep a little better. Maybe get my inbox under control. Possibly fold some laundry. (Definitely fold laundry. I'm down to socks that don’t match and shirts from races I don’t even remember doing.)

But then the week did what weeks do: it exploded in slow motion.

Father’s Day orders started rolling in, and suddenly my days were a blur of packaging tape, shipping labels, and very specific personalization requests. The lasers ran nonstop. My printers staged a coup. I walked through the house eating peanut butter pretzels like they were medicine.

I barely ran and I barely wrote. Heck, I barely sat down.

And still, my brain tried to turn it into a scorecard:

You didn’t write anything this week. Minus ten points.

You haven’t updated your Substack in days. Inexcusable, minus fifteen.

You said you were going to run. You didn’t. Lies and laziness? Minus twenty points.

But you know what? Keeping score like that doesn’t help. It doesn’t make the words come faster or the miles easier or the stress lighter. All it does is make a long week feel like failure.

And it wasn’t failure, not by a long shot. It was just life.

Life gets like this sometimes.
It piles up in ways we don’t expect. It turns our carefully laid plans into a beautiful mess of good problems: too many orders, too many ideas, too many hours awake with things undone.

And when that happens, the best thing I’ve learned (and I am learning, over and over again) is not to fight with it. Not to scold myself, or rehearse the guilt.

Instead, I’m trying to forgive, breathe, move on. I’m trying to remember that I’m not a machine and that every week is a new chance to start again. There will be time to write and run and sit. There will even be time to create something that doesn’t have to be packed in a bubble mailer.

This week wasn’t that week. But maybe next week will be. Or maybe tomorrow.
Or maybe later tonight, after I take a walk and eat something green.

If you’re reading this and feeling behind, or a little scrambled, or like your to-do list is just mocking you from across the room:
You’re not broken, or lazy, or bad at what you are doing.
You’re just living, and that’s allowed to be messy.

PS: If you’ve had a week too, tell me about it.
I promise to read it with the same compassion I’m learning to give myself. Possibly while eating more peanut butter pretzels (WHY are these SO GOOD?)

PPS:
If this resonated with you, and you’d like to help fuel the next round of writing (or gently encourage me to eat something besides pretzels), you can buy me a coffee: