A non-guidey guide from a 'Soon to be Bride' Part 8

Well this is definitely not the blog I thought I’d be writing this month, after I started last months blog with ‘the final countdown’. In the space of this last month, I have gone from finalising numbers and receiving those RSVP that I was so anxiously awaiting, to searching out postponement cards and amending my countdown from 59 to 242 days.

That’s right… our wedding has been postponed due to the corona pandemic.

I don’t even know how to begin re-telling the roller coaster of emotions that I have been through these past few weeks. I’m not sure that I’m even ready too, and it’s just all too raw right now.

Currently I am so utterly gutted that I can’t even bring myself to read back on my past blogs. How trivial do all my previous woes and stresses seem now? It wasn't long ago that my biggest worry was 'who could sit with who on a table'. How I’d love for that to be my biggest stress right now! Reality is, at any given point your stress is your stress and you can’t change it, it’s just funny to look back now and think how insignificant that was in the grand scheme of things!

Looking on the bright side (yes, there is a bright side although sometimes hard to see in this darkness), the increase in time until our new wedding date from 2 months to 8 months has given us the extra time to afford a few extras that we weren’t able to initially. We’ve added a photo booth and will hopefully now invite a few more day guests to the wedding too.

Every time I think of something vaguely positive, I add it to a physical list – this is helping me to try and focus on the positives and keep my mind in a good place rather than dwelling on the negatives. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t always easy and lots of tears and tantrums have been had as it’s so easy to spiral into sadness and anger as you feel hard done by. These feelings don’t achieve anything though, which is why I’ve written my positives lists to keep me focused on the good that has come from this.

When I first received the email from my venue to confirm that they were postponing all April and May weddings, I couldn’t help but have a little cry. Thankfully we were social distancing at work so no one saw me! I had the full melt down and lots of tears when I got home to Jack that evening. I allowed myself the evening to feel angry and sad, and grieve my lost wedding dates, before I told myself it could be worse and to move on.

What has really struck a chord with me these past few weeks is the overriding feeling of kindness that has been shown by everyone out there in this unprecedented time – not just to me, but other brides-to-be and everyone that is pulling together to get our country through this period of craziness in general. There really has been some beautiful and genuine kindness.

If I can give one bit of advice right now, it’d be to say… do yourselves a favour and don’t focus on the news that just wants to report on people being selfish and panic buying and instead focus on the good news stories… like how as I'm writing this we have had over 250,000 people who are currently out of work volunteering to do anything they can to help other people, and the businesses out there struggling themselves but still giving things out for free to try and make strangers lives easier. It's really something special.

On a personal level, I have felt kindness from all our suppliers. Being a DIY bride has meant that I only had to contact 4 suppliers to reschedule their services, which has made things a little less stressful on our part. Every single one of them has absolutely bent over backwards and sent the loveliest emails of reassurance which has really helped me. I know not everyone out there is able to give the service I have received at the moment and lots of people are struggling to find common ground with their suppliers as it's just awful for everyone, but stay positive and try to work through it with them.

For my own state of mind, I have decided to pack away all of our wedding ‘stuff’ for a couple of months until our original date has passed. I think having a short break from it all (unless isolation gets too much, and I really need things to do!) will be healing and much needed.

The question now is ‘how do we spend our original wedding date?’ and ‘what do we do with all the personalised items we’ve had made?’. We’re trying to decide whether putting out all our personalised bits with the original date on it will by funny by the time our new date comes or whether we need to start over!?

So, for now all I can say is stay safe everyone and look after each other. To all of you brides-to-be out there who are really feeling it at the moment, I want to leave you with an email that I received from Trousseaux (Whitewed approved, go check them out!) who I bought my wedding dress from which has helped me through when I'm feeling low...

Your bride-to-be

Steph x