Maybe if I cry enough thinking ABOUT the wedding, I won’t cry as much AT the wedding.

Sometimes I feel things so strongly I feel like my heart will burst. Happy or sad, its intense! I feel things deeply, always have. It comes from my mother, who is worse than me.

For the longest time, I would laugh and taunt her when she teared up at commercials or sappy movies. I’d do this to hide the fact that I was actually right there with her. I know she saw right through this.

I have cried at almost every movie I’ve ever seen, starting when I watched E.T. at four years old and onward. From the cute little scenes in G rated movies, to the epic crying fest that was This Is Us, it’s inevitable that something will strike a chord with me and the waterworks will flow. I think in a way it’s a blessing, because it helps me to better release my emotions that get stuck inside sometimes. I do like the feeling of these kinds of tears.

When it comes to watching movies and TV and reading books, Ryan will always say that I “suspend disbelief.” As in, I become immersed in the world of the setting and characters that I almost become them through my empathic abilities. My mom used to say to me in the theater “it’s not real, it’s only pretend.” I think I should start reminding myself of that.

But then there is my strong ability to visualize things in my mind, both for the past and future, as if I am viewing my own movies in my mind. So, for example, I can still go back to the room my grandmother died in and remember every little sensory detail of the room, what was said, the energy, etc. But I can also envision a wonderful future, even if it doesn’t play out that way in reality.

This all poses a bit of a problem for my upcoming wedding day. I don’t want everyone to see me ugly cry like they did at my college graduations. And even though I think it’s funny now, I don’t want to have to look at too many photos like this:

Now that we’re in the most involved part of designing and planning our wedding, there are so many things that I’ve cried over already. Here’s just a sample of them:

• Finding my wedding dress
• Envisioning walking down the aisle with my mom and dad
• Listening to a song we love that we are working on incorporating into the ceremony on repeat, then showing it to my mom while we texted each other about it while she was listening
• Finding a string quartet to help get the song performed and then listening to samples of their repertoire
• Thinking about what I could write to say to everyone and Ryan and having to figure out how to get through reading any of it out loud
• Writing about the people we love who’ve passed and want to memorialize at the wedding, and then reading them with my mom and future mother-in-law
• My mind’s eye seeing everyone who will be there celebrating us and our love
• People offering kind things to us in relation to the wedding
• Thinking about all the things my friend and I have been through and how she will be next to me at the altar
• Thinking about holding up my dress to walk everywhere
• The idea of making hankies for people as a keepsake sprinkled with their tears forever 😆
• Trying to thank my parents when they put the deposit in for our venue, an impossible task to express how much they mean to me and how much gratitude I have for them
• This entire blog.
• Basically everything

So, maybe if I cry for the next 489 days before the wedding rolls around, my eyes will be dry by then. 🤣

PS: Luckily, the same concepts can all be applied when it comes to me and laughter. Sometimes I have to force myself to stop laughing so hard so I don’t hyperventilate and/or suffocate. But, of course, laughing can also make me cry, so we are back to where we started.