Fly By Night Wedding: Where I’ve Been.

Fly By Night Wedding was always my labor of love. You might know that I ran this blog for a year before telling anyone about it. In stolen moments I would build, tinker, write, list post ideas in my Notes app.

I didn’t tell anyone Fly By Night Wedding existed until I was getting hundreds of page views a day. If I couldn’t make that happen, I felt like what I was doing was embarrassing. Shameful. Something to laugh at. My worst fear was that people, especially people I knew, would talk behind my back about how delusional I was. Have you seen her ~little wedding blog~? What’s even going on there?

Hitting a certain number of page views and making (very modest) money from Fly By Night Wedding made this feel *legitimate.* Not big time by any means. But like to some degree, I was figuring this out. Kinda getting the hang of things, even.

Then came March 2020.

Trying to talk about this time, and the months after, is hard for all the reasons you would already expect. It’s also hard for reasons that are often too painful for me to speak about in therapy. For most of it, like so many of us, I was barely surviving.

And then, the question of what to do with my wedding blog, of all things? What did I–or any of us–know in spring of 2020? I saw other blogs posting about “safe weddings” and “safe honeymoons” before there was well-researched, evidence-based info about how COVID-19 did and did not spread. How could I lie and say I knew *anything* about what a safe wedding looked like while medical infrastructures across the globe were crushed trying to treat those who caught it?

In the midst of knowing what I didn’t know and struggling to get out of bed every day, Fly By Night Wedding just…fell off.

Even once 2020 was done, once wounds inflicted in that year began their very long healing paths, once we knew more, once I was fully vaccinated…I still felt sick thinking about touching this blog again.

Why? Because I was ashamed that I couldn’t keep it going during the worst year of my life.

I felt like I didn’t “deserve” to pick this up again. That I had failed, that was it, and I should move on quietly. Like the care and effort I put into making this happen didn’t matter.

But to be honest, I’ve missed this. I have a lot of fun writing Fly By Night Wedding. And I’ve been getting nudges from various facets of my life pointing to how I allow myself so much less kindness and understanding than I give. How often feel I have to make penance for my perfectly human imperfection.

So I want to pick this back up. I am truly sorry to those of you who wrote me during 2020 that never got a response. Today I read your emails and wish I could have been present for you. I hope you can understand.

But I want to have fun with this again.  I’m excited to write and dig into all the things that made me want to start Fly By Night Wedding in the first place. If you’re still reading, thanks for sticking around. I’m glad to be back.