Have you ever had one of those weeks where you feel like a Whack-a-Mole?

You know, a week when every morning you pop up from your hole, all excited to greet the world, and then WHACK! The world is like, “Eff you, Mole. Get back in your hole.” And then the world hits you on the head with a rubber mallet.

Of course you’ve had those weeks.

Because I’m guessing we’re all old enough to have reached that cynical turning point in our lives — that point that culminates from a childhood full of people telling us that “the world isn’t perfect,” and then we get older and realize, maybe just subconsciously, that wow. The world totally IS perfect.

It’s us that’s the problem.

Case-in-point:

I ran out of coffee on Monday morning. I still have no coffee today. We live in this beautiful place that grows these plants that sprout these coffee cherries that house these seeds that we call “beans,” and then we pick them and dry them or soak them and hull them and sort them and roast them and grind them and brew them and drink them, at which point we develop a horrible ailment called, CAFFEINE ADDICTION. It’s a problem that, when left untreated, can cause us to do crazy things like brew old boxes of chai flavored green tea that we had shoved in our cabinets because we’re still waiting for the buy-one-get-one-free packages of Gevalia to arrive because they threw in free shipping, and also we’re cheap.

My lazy coffee purchasing habits aren’t my only problem.

Communication has been a big issue for me this week. Of course on the tails of writing an entire post on the subject of effective communication and how awesome I am at it, I somehow managed to screw up a photo shoot for a magazine by misinterpreting text messages and the slight problem of missing my new editor’s emails because they were filtered to my spam folder.

“Did u ask the chef what inspired the recipe?” she texted after my shoot. WHACK!

“Make sure you get a photo of the chef holding the dish,” instructed her spaminated email. WHACK!

“Can’t you do anything right?” she didn’t actually ask. But it felt like she should have. And I wouldn’t blame her. WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!

I had a headache for an entire day.

I also got in a fight with my mother and somehow inadvertently managed to trigger a family crisis on Justin’s side that I believe is better now, but my head still reels from the confusion of why or how it all happened to begin with.

WHACK!

Justin had to be out-of-town this week for our anniversary.

WHACK!

I got bit by a fly and forty-seven mosquitos and one of my dogs ate my breakfast cookie and it won’t stop raining and

okay.

Now we’re just into the normal stuff. But you can understand, maybe now, how I’ve felt like a whack-a-mole. I started things off with the best of intentions, but every time I popped up from my hole, I received a knee-crumbling smack on the head. And it felt like I was getting smacked for things that weren’t really my fault, but still were, somehow, and I ended up feeling terrible for inadvertently making the lives of everyone I touched a little crappier this week.

Because that’s not really my life’s goal, you know? Especially as a writer.

• MAKE EVERYONE’S LIFE CRAPPIER THIS WEEK.

Check.

We can cross that one off of the list.

What’s next? Strangling puppies?

And that’s the problem with this perfect world filled with imperfect people — this world where some people are willing to admit their faults and others are not. Where miscommunication happens and people get hurt. Where you think the Gevalia advertisement that showed up in your mailbox was kismet, but really it was just a ploy to make you wait for over a week while they apparently harvest and dry and hull and sort and roast your precious beans so you can finally drink your devil’s brew.

Sometimes our best of intentions fall all askew. We miss things. We over-think them. We under-think them. We talk too much, or we don’t talk enough. Sometimes we climb and climb and climb and then we start to get cocky, and WHACK. That’s when the world kindly reminds us that we do not, in fact, know everything.

Look.

I’ll be the first (okay, maybe more like the second) person to admit when I screw up. It’s never easy. It’s never fun. Popping out of that hole day after day, whack after whack, is damn scary. But I think, in the end, even though it leaves me vulnerable to judgement and exposed to ridicule and experiencing that about-to-throw-up feeling that happens while I wait for someone to tell me it will be okay and then that I’m-really-about-to-throw-up feeling when sometimes that moment never ever comes, it’s still the right thing to do.

Because you see, when you expose all of your parts to the rest of the imperfect people in this world — not just the pretty parts, but the mosquito bites and the chin hair and all of your completely and utterly whackable moles — you are, in effect, admitting solidarity.

Even when no one admits it with you.

You’re saying, Hey. I’m one of us. No better, no worse, maybe sometimes a little hairier, maybe sometimes a little molier, but there you go. And that’s okay. Because I’m still learning, just like you.

And when you find that you’re the one holding that all-powerful mallet, just remember:

Go easy.

Most of us have headaches already.