Gift Guide: Hosting Gifts!

It's officially that time of the year! Holiday decorations have taken up residence in every store, holiday music has been playing in CVS since the day after Halloween, and Starbucks even switched over to its red cups!

I was raised to never go to someone's house empty handed. That could mean bringing a pan of brownies to a super bowl party, a bottle of wine in a cute canvas tote to a Halloween party, or small gifts picked out especially for the host (or hostess)
for Holiday parties!  Something I firmly believe is that, as long as it's something that show a little extra thought in, the cost doesn't really matter.

So, in the spirit of getting ready for Friendsgiving and Holiday gatherings, here's a quick run down of ideas that would be a little more than a bottle of wine but sure not to break the bank!

So Much Hustle, So Little Time

I've truly been the girl on the go for as long as I've been at college. 

My freshman year, I walked on to crew and joined a sorority in addition to school work and my attempt at a social life. It went really well...for a semester. The spring semester, I absolutely fell apart. There were a lot of tears, calls home, and asking for extensions on work to accommodate for the breakdowns. To save my sanity, I left crew at the end of the year. 

Spending the next fall semester getting back in the swing of things, I did my first internship during my sophomore spring and was hooked. Did I run out of time to have a consistent social life? Yep. But I devoted my heart to doing something that would provide me with an amazing future. From there, the internships never ended. Proof: I'm currently in my last semester of college and took an internship I simply could not pass up instead of spreading out my classes and enjoying myself.

Running from one thing to another has actually become my life this semester, with classes, my internship, sorority events, and trying to work fun things in to all that when possible. 

But it didn't hit me how bad I had become until I was speed-walking from the metro station to my office in the rain at 7 p.m. that I really thought about it: is the "hustle" helping or hurting?

To be fair, I'm not sure I have the answer to my own question. I've spent so much of my life thinking this was the dream: to be spread thin and juggling things I love with the more monotonous activities (school work, I'm looking at you). 

Doesn't that sound ridiculous? This was my goal, to be overworked and exhausted every night, to the point where I regularly fall asleep having half done my reading for the next day. 

I've long lived the motto of holding myself to a standard of "grace, not perfection" but I never paid attention to the fact that what I was doing was completely unsustainable. 

While this may be my last semester of this particular balancing act, I'm certain there will be more balancing to come in the future. So, my goal for November is simple:

Enjoy the things I get to do more, instead of constantly worrying about the next thing on my list. More time spent doing life and less time spent planning it. 

Don't get me wrong, I'll never lose my type-A personality but I'm aiming to be more focused on the puzzle and less so on what to do after the puzzle is all pieced together.

So y'all ever notice too much hustle and not enough heart in your life? How do you work to get yourself back on track? Let me know in the comments!