Getting Back to Myself

When I was planning for my wedding, I visited many websites designed to help the to the bride-to-be in all her planning needs.  On these sites, other pre-wedding and post-wedding women offered advice on flowers, music, and all the many, many decisions that need to be made for the special day.  Sometimes it was helpful information, and other times it was information overload, causing me to ask Craig if we wanted to add personalized napkin rings for everyone, or something equally superfluous.

Occasionally, I’d run across a thread of conversation where a post-wedding bride would lament about how much she missed all the planning.  I remember thinking “Are you CRAZY?” because I couldn’t wait for that part to be over.  Yes, I was excited to be marrying the man of my dreams, but I was more interested in our life after the big day.  Don’t get me wrong, I wanted the big day, but I was certain that I’d find it a relief when that day passed; a certainty that grew the closer we got to the wedding.

To a great extent, I was relieved when we got back from our honeymoon and had nothing else to plan.  “Finally,” I thought, “I’ll be able to get back to my normal routine.”  However, a couple weeks after we returned, I still felt quite lethargic and unmotivated.  At first I thought it was just because I’d gotten sick at the end of the trip and maybe it was taking longer than normal to get rid of the cold.  But when the lack of energy went into December, and then January, I had to admit that something else was up.

Upon closer examination, I realized it wasn’t really a lack of energy, but more an apathy that had taken over me.  I realized I didn’t want to do anything.  I didn’t want to make holiday cookies, which is a tradition for me.  I didn’t want to edit any pictures I’d taken on recent trips.  I didn’t even want to keep up with my blogs, whereas before I’d left for the honeymoon, I had a month’s worth of blogs written, revised and ready to go for both sites.

I began to notice this apathy in just about everything in my life.  It seemed that I didn’t want to do much more than sit on my butt watching TV every night when I came home.  “I don’t wanna.” became my inner mantra, and I couldn’t figure out why.

Slowly I realized that THIS is what those brides on the wedding threads were talking about.  Now, maybe some of them really did enjoy all the planning for their special day, but I think the bigger issue was that they’d spent SO much of their time and energy focusing on this huge event, they didn’t know how to come down from it again, returning to their daily life.

At least that’s what was happening to me.  I felt like a woman who’d just given birth and was going through post-partum depression.  Granted, I’ve never had a child, so I might be completely off about how PPD feels, but I think it’s probably similar. In fact, I began to come up with acronyms of my own; Post Wedding-Planning Disorder (PWPD) being the one that stuck.

Once I realized what I was experiencing, I wondered how I didn’t see it before.  It was so obvious to me now that I was feeling a huge hole somewhere in my life that had previously been taken up with wedding planning.  But when you’re in a certain depression, you can’t always understand what’s behind it.  You have to get out of the emotional hole you’re in in order to see the situation clearly.

I’m still not entirely back to myself, but I’m getting there.  It’s a slower process than I thought it would be, but I just take it day by day, and sometime soon I’m sure I’ll be back to planning some other event in my life.

There must be a trip I want to take this year.  😉