October is almost over and I have yet to acknowledge that it was the start of my last quarter of health-centric goals, this time focused around nutrition. As a perfectionist, I’m not always very yielding with my ideals, but at 38 weeks pregnant, I am now days to weeks away from meeting my second baby and if parenting has taught me anything, it’s to be willing to release expectations, lower standards, and allow for a low bar of what is “enough”.

Anticipating the end of the year to come at me at lightning speed, especially when newborn parenthood causes all the days and nights of the next few months to bleed into each other, I’ve been taking some time already to consider what I want to focus on in 2022. I reopened my 2021 year goal planner and was reminded that my focus word/theme of the year was “Let go (of what I can’t control, of the past, of judgment, of things I don’t need)”. So, while I had originally started this blog with the idea that I would split 2021 into quarters each with a health-related focus goals (breathe, sleep, hydrate, nourish), I’m letting this go for now.

So my current goal for this quarter? Relax. Really embrace that “Let things go” mantra I set for myself this year. I’m doing more stretches, checking in with my body and letting go of the tension I find there, forgiving myself more often for the times when I’m less than perfect, forgiving others when they also don’t meet my expectations, recognizing what is really and truly important and trying not to focus on the rest of it. Writing all of that out is pretty easy, but in practice I take a lot of reminding. I didn’t set SMART goals for myself this quarter. My goal is to check in with my body as often as I can, tune into what it needs, and meet that need as I am able (or ask for help where I am not… asking for help is doubly hard for me). There’s no way for me to “fail”. If I think about it, I check in with myself, and I have succeeded and that is that.

I’m very pregnant. I’m having trouble sleeping, physically uncomfortable most of the time, mentally carrying a hefty workload, and feeling like a ticking time bomb that could go off at any moment. Letting things go is the best kindness I can give to myself.