I cracked open this blog today for the first time in over a year. It feels tentative, soft, a palpitation of hope interwoven with disquiet. Even without a reader-base, even without most of my closest friends reading this blog, I am anxious and tender about telling any kind of truth online. So, with wobbly legs and watery eyes, with lips bitten and fingers crossed, I’ll step out of my doldrums.
First things first, I had a bit of fun creating categories for my old posts:
- Fat liberation and just plain fatness
- Grief and loss
- Nerdery
- Queerness/gender
- Random thoughts
- Rants
- Romance
- Writing about writing and not writing
And I found some drafts, mostly about my river-deep love for my spouse. This little gem of a paragraph was in a draft from 2018, during the stressful time of planning our wedding:
The thing I keep forgetting is that being with you, marrying you, *is* my dreams coming true. I want everything at once and at high speed, but I forget that I have already emerged from the chrysalis, dusted myself off, and flown away.
Its title was “Take This Stress and Shove It,” FYI, which I can only assume I meant as a directive to myself. And this one, titled “How Marrying My Partner of Many Years Changes My Life,” is dated less than two weeks before the big day:
I’ve spent some time searching for answers lately. I hit a bit of a wall about my impending marriage — not because I have doubts about spending my life with my love, but because I can’t fathom what comes next for us.
I struggled so much with the idea of what long-term, forever love looked like for us, beyond our emotions, which were never in doubt. I was stopping in my tracks about how romance like that worked, how it looked up close, and how to keep it healthy. Ever the one to be set up for success, I was grappling with a persistent fear of abandonment, dubious role models, and terrible self-regulation and habit-building. I once killed a cactus, so how could I possibly keep this living love from putrefaction?
We’ve been married for more than two years now, together for nearly 8, and we’ve been through great change: buying a house, sheltering in place, losing my mom. As it turns out, we were right all along. We take care of each other, treat each other with respect, and hold hands as we walk into transformation. And of course, we benefit from a chosen family of incredible love and support. I found this one—actually published and not left on draft—dated just two days before the wedding, titled “Or maybe that’s just me:”
When you’ve been planning your wedding for a year and it’s happening in two days and there’s a massive storm bearing down on your loved ones. You pray, you cry, you still celebrate, and you keep busy. You pack exquisite little fruits for your partner to take to work and then eat Oreos for breakfast in your sweatpants. You make extensive spreadsheets and lists of everything that still needs to be accomplished. You pack boxes and binders, and if you’re really lucky, you have an amazing partner and two amazing best friends who see you, who know they have to stand near when the fear rattles you.
And now, just perhaps, we’ve come full circle. Back to fear, back to friendship, pack to planning, setting intentions, and leaping with my fingers crossed.