Whoa. In going through archived posts last night, I found this one, unpublished. I wrote this two months before our wedding, and I never published it, because it just made me feel to vulnerable. I can tell you now, that during this week, REALLY hard stuff happened. I cried, very hard, a lot. And looking back, yes, it was rock bottom, and yes, it was worth crying about. And yes it got better. But when all this hard stuff was happening, when I told people (or hinted to it on the blog) people would tell me, "Don't worry, you'll be married in the end!" And I'd want to scream, "I f*cking know that, but that does not make this moment any less painful." But I shut up and hunkered down and plowed through. So now that it's over, now that you know how wonderful it was in the end, I'm going to finally hit publish on this. This is for you, whoever you are, crying yourself to sleep over some part of the wedding. This is my hug, lady, because I needed one then:

I hit what I sincerely hope will be rock bottom of wedding planning last week. I cried myself to sleep at least once, and David and I had a few bouts of yelling at each other. Why am I admitting to this? Well, first of all, I'm feeling much better now so it feels safe to talk about it. But mostly I'm talking about it because I think that wedding planning often isn't easy, and our desire to speak only about the good parts of it can make you feel isolated and crazy when things get hard.

There are infinite stressors in planning weddings, but as a somewhat-indie-bride, I find that one of the pressures is to act like you've got it under control, and like your wedding isn't really a big deal anyway, so who cares? Well. If only, right? Here is the real truth: weddings involve a lot of really big important things, they involve family, grappling with tradition, relationships with friends, and with an externalization of your values, just to name a few. Weddings have a way of bringing long-standing issues to the surface, of forcing you to deal with things you would rather ignore. So when I say I cried myself to sleep over the wedding, I don't mean that I cried myself to sleep because I couldn't find stamps that matched my envelopes precisely. Please. I cried myself to sleep over good friends who were not there when we needed them, over how much work I had to do and how overwhelmed I felt by it, over caring about my wedding when the world was telling me that I shouldn't care. In short, I cried over big stuff. And when two people are sad about big stuff, sometimes they yell at each other. That's how it rolls. Continue reading Wedding Undergraduate: Me