What does that even mean? When I first started writing I quickly found out that my style of
writing was like a painting, a narrative, a journey, an adventure with a lot of personality and a bit
of naughty, but most importantly: I followed my own rules. My friends would tell me how they
loved receiving my letters (when I was a kid) and emails as I grew up because they could so
vividly see in front of them, the thoughts, emotions, the adventures, or situations I had gotten
myself into, jumping off the pages. When I moved to the US, I realized that not only was my
style of writing different and more personable than what Americans were used to, but
grammatically you guys do some weird s&*^. In the beginning, I tried to adapt, curbing my
otherwise TMI writing style, my run on sentences that makes me breathe with happiness, use
boring essay writing rules and learned all of the, to me anyway, bizarre commas, when listing
things such as, a word, another word, and a comma before the “and” when listing the last word.
But in my attempt to fit into and be taken seriously in this new country, the changes took away
my personality, it took away the essence of what I wanted to say and the ability to so vividly
translate to others what I wanted to convey. And then what good am I as a writer if I am no
longer true to myself?! So I went back to being me, working with editors who got me, such as
Rick Bard from Manhattan Bride Magazine, who let me run with my ideas, and my sentences,
and whom I trusted to change that comma when they felt like they needed to, but usually they
did not.
All of this to say, that when you embark on your journey as a bride you encounter so many of
those people who tell you how you are supposed to do things, what you are supposed to
expect, what is supposedly expected of you, and how you are supposed to feel. (Yeah, I did the
comma). You try so hard to fit in, to do the right thing for everyone else that sometimes your
voice is totally lost, and sometimes you become a shadow of yourself, and risk becoming a
caricature of yourself because you try so hard to do the right thing. Isn’t that such a paradox?
There are ways to stay true to yourself and still make others happy. There are ways to
communicate when something is against your nature, but the key is to catch it early enough so
you can communicate it before it has tied you into knots and you desperately try to find out what
is your opinion and what is someone else’s.
So what it all means is that being a bride, going through all of those pre-wedding planning
experiences, emotions and tribulations, (see, I didn’t do it here - makes sense now doesn’t it ;-))
is setting you up to what life will serve you with this partner - in all its glory and all its non glory.
For richer and for poorer really means, “I am here with you walking through life, taking on your
crazy sister, your derogatory uncle and your messiness planning this wedding, realizing that the
same issues will revisit over and over again throughout our marriage and lives together. I
therefore cannot lose myself, my style, my personality because then I will not be the person you
fell in love with and asked to marry.”
With love,
Malena Belefonte
