Old News

I have not written on my blog for a month and a half. That's the longest I've ever gone since starting this blog seven years ago. What happened was that I suddenly had a Major Life Change that left me at a complete loss as to how to blog about it, and with significantly less free time in which to write. I felt like I could stick to business as usual on my blog, which felt weird, and potentially suspect to the people in my life who knew that business was most certainly not as usual. Or I could blog about the fact that business is far from usual, and I just didn't know how to do that.

Today I sat down to finally write the blog entry I've been meaning to write for weeks, and I ran into exactly what I had kept me from writing this all along, which is that no matter how I started, it was eventually going to turn mushy. I tried really hard to write a bigger story and analogize and relate everything to other life memories, but ultimately I scrapped (almost) the whole thing because I just couldn't keep from veering into mushy territory. It kept going there. I couldn't stop it. It turns out that I kind of think Brian is awesome. I kind of feel really lucky that I get to marry him. I kind of feel totally amazed at how things played out over the past several years, and months, and weeks to bring us together. I'm kind of really happy. I'm also kind of veering off into mushy again.

But I salvaged one paragraph from my original, discarded blog post. This is the paragraph I want to publish, and once I do I'll count my work as done - I'll have made the announcement on my blog to all my readers who already know that I'm getting married, and then I'll be able to go back to blogging as usual. Except that sometimes I might blog not just about the weather or teaching or my dog or marathon training, but about wedding planning, or about Brian.

This was my thought:

For a long, long time I had no idea how meeting someone you wanted to marry really worked. Incidentally, I still don't. For as long as I spent single, I had kind of come to a subconscious belief that people who got married must be privy to some secret knowledge that people who don't get married just haven't found yet. You meet the right person and suddenly the mystery is unlocked. But that's not what it feels like to me. It feels a lot less strange and earth-shattering and mysterious than I would have expected. It feels nice and happy and exciting and awesome, but it doesn't really feel like I just unlocked a mystery and now I understand. To me, that might be the strangest and best part of all.