I want to share an example of how my husband and I recently(as in, during 2013) focused on what we needed in life and employed the idea of Living For Yourself.

On October 16, 2010 my boyfriend of 6 and a half years popped the question! Of course, I said yes.

The visual inspiration-aholic I am, started making plans, pinning like mad and trying to dream up what I wanted for my perfect day.

And then my sister decided to get married 2 months before we planned to and since my parents were paying for both weddings, asked us to wait. And so we agreed. And then my brother decided to get married the next year and, while my parents weren’t paying, it just felt like we wanted it to be more special. And then I got pregnant. And then we were raising a child and dealing with my huge decline in mental health and trying to get me help.

And so after 3 years, we had moved in with my parents and were just waiting for the insurance at my fiance’s new job to kick in so all 3 of us would be covered and we could figure out what we wanted to do for our wedding.

Throw a big party?
Throw a small party?
Run away?

Ugh, they all sounded hard and not right.

We are both introverts who hate being the center of attention. My panic disorder, makes it even harder for me to want to be around a ton of people and the center of everything, even if it is just family. And then to top it all off, being a girl who loves romance and books and movies…I felt like the media shows families and friends being oh so very excited and thrilled and over the top when two people are going to get married. And I didn’t feel that way.

I felt like most people thought, “Oh finally. They already have a kid, just get hitched already!” It was no big deal. We were essentially already married in most ways, just not legally. So I wanted our wedding to be special for us and not be bogged down with anxiety and feeling like no one was as happy as I wanted them to be.

We sat down and focused on us. We talked about what would make us the least anxious while still making my parents happy. The biggest thing that helped me decide was that every other way that my mom, my fiance or I came up with on how to do our wedding made my anxiety bloom and I just could not fathom planning it. I stopped trying to come up with ideas and figure it out.

The one thing that kept sticking was pseudo eloping. And I could picture myself planning it without freaking out.

It was perfect.

My mom performed the ceremony. Our son held our rings. In Illinois, you don’t need witnesses. It was just the five of us (plus our amazing photographer, Emily), in a large county park. I was anxious the first part of the day but all in all, we were extremely happy with how we decided to get married. It was a perfect day. The one thing I insisted on was having a photographer to document our family and our small, private ceremony and I couldn’t have been more happy about it.

We did compromise and throw a wedding party for extended family about 6 weeks later, but it was a small compromise. We got to spend our special day happy and in love and not worrying about anyone else.

Share: How have you recently focused on living for yourself?

Note: all images in this post are by the lovely Emily Plunkett.