time travel via the classic medium of blog posts

Phase One, the neurotic wedding/lifestyle blogging as a distraction from debilitating pain, fear and anxiety era. 

Leaving and Forgetting, Joshua Jensen-Nagle

2008 

Spiraling depression, anxiety, despair. Much hyperventilating and sobbing. A lot of shouting, impulsive creation of an unforeseeably tenacious blog. 

Some (fucking loads of) wedding planning. Quite a few meltdowns. Quite a lot of utterly pointless thinking about dresses and shoes and flowers and veils, EVEN AFTER I WAS MARRIED, potentially as distraction from the aforementioned anxiety and despair.  

A business started, a slow crawl out of chronic illness towards gainful employment, aided by millions of hours spent on wedding blogs (IT'S BUSINESS RESEARCH, HONESTLY).  

Rabbits. 

Eerily prescient dreams of a future that would take a decade to even begin to realise.  

Global excitement for the future of American politics (remember that? HA!)

Much time spent lusting after and posting about objects, things, stuff. So much time, so much stuff. 

Oh and a wedding. Which I remember writing a LOT about. I don't remember then deleting all of those posts but there you have it. 

2009 

A year of waiting. Of pointless medical appointments and of throwing ourselves into making a home and a life of just the two of us while getting through a frankly brutal medical regime of management of chronic pain and infertility. Fun! 

The confidence to try (and succeed) to sell my work.

Obsessing over our fucking wedding, STILL, and an eventual coming to peace with the whole thing.    

Gifts of magic through my letter box. 

A business blooming and flourishing, an invitation to New York City to photograph the wedding of maybe my single biggest internet crush. No biggie.

A devastating loss. 

This post. 

Waiting. 

2010

OOOH BOY. That was a year.  

It started with further distractions, cakes eaten, swaplets swapped (blogging magic happening all over). Then shit all got A BIT MUCH.

Probably because I'd been injecting hormones into myself and had my eggs harvested (not at all a horrifying terminology) and then after a little marinating had them put back in while a nurse held my hand and sang Susan Boyle (remember her?) at me and then I had TWO BABIES in me. It was a lot.  

Meanwhile the universe felt that a volcanic eruption might help things along. It didn't. But the trip to New York was rather nice, when we finally got there. 

The year progressed, I photographed a lot of weddings while pregnant. People stared.  

I finally started writing about the pain of getting to pregnant. It felt good. The comments still make me cry. (parts 2 and 3 of my endometriosis story)

The look of life changed. I had FEARS.  

My dear friend wrote probably the three most useful posts that have ever appeared here. 1, 2, 3.  

I gave birth twice in one morning. It was intense. Things didn't chill for quite a while. 

And that was that for the year everything changed.