Happy Birthday Want That Wedding!

Hello my dears, it’s time to celebrate a very important date in the WTW calendar!

I’ve turned one!! Yes, Want That Wedding has now been live and blogging on the world wide web for 1 whole year, and what a year it’s been.

I’m not sure if you’ve been with me since the beginning or whether you recently started following the blog or whether you’re familiar at all with the story of how it came to be that I am now a wedding blogger..?

Well, I was in a very dark place indeed and I wasn’t coping well with life. I’d just married and it should have been one of the happiest times of my life, but I was falling apart. Gripped with anxiety and depression, the fear and sadness I felt on a continual basis was pushing me over the edge. I wanted to end it all. My job, my marriage, shit, even my life! Now don’t go feeling all sorry for me, I only wanted the pain and crippling fear that consumed my every waking moment to stop.

Luckily, my husband and family staged an intervention and I was taken to the doctor pronto. There I explained how I’d been feeling… for such a long, long time. Even though I had suffered with anxiety and depression on and off for years the build up to my wedding and honeymoon had finally tipped me over the edge. I described how my world had become a smaller and smaller place. I described the endless list of my fears and phobias {I was fearful of enclosed spaces, unfamiliar surroundings, being more than a few hours away from home, being in situations I couldn’t control and so many more things. My affliction was constantly evolving and stealing more and more of my existence). I explained I was finding it hard to function and carry out basic tasks, how I was crying all the time. I confessed my permanent dread and fear about life and that I was having strange thoughts about ending it all.

To my relief (and everyone around me) I was diagnosed with GAD (generalised anxiety disorder) and it was explained (to my husband and I) that I’d been ill for a long time. I was reassured that seeking help was the right thing to do and prescribed counselling and anti anxiety medication.

Things weren’t easy, but slowly, very slowly, I came back to life. The Sonia that Chris (my husband) had fallen in love with began to emerge again. I started to travel on tubes (previously unthinkable), to stay over at friends and families houses without having an anxiety melt down. I stopped being weirded out by being ‘Mrs Collett’ and the obsessive thoughts and feelings I’d had began to subside. Most importantly, I started to dream again about life and mine and my husband’s future!

I enrolled on a course. Wedding planning, styling and design and everything seemed to snowball from there. Within a couple of months I’d had the vision of starting my own wedding blog (haha how naive I was, I was yet to find out about the zillion and one other wedding blogs out there). My husband and I brain stormed. He (clever boy) came up with the name Want That Wedding. I described to him how I wanted the artwork to look and he designed it beautifully for me. I taught myself wordpress, opened twitter, facebook and pinterest accounts and tentatively started to make my way in this newfound world. The wedding industry!

I made mistakes! Lots of them. I had successes. A more modest amount J. I organised styled shoots and collaborated with some of the industries finest. I was published on Rock My Wedding, Wedding Chicks, Rock n’ Roll Bride and Love My Dress to name a few. I grew my readership from 100 unique views per month to over 10,000 unique views per month. I opened up the blog to sponsorship. I worried, I fretted, I plotted and I planned. And to my amazement I’m still here, still going strong! Still insecure and unsure of myself, but still excited, proud and looking to the future!

Next month sees a brand new challenge for myself and Want That Wedding. Oh yes! I’ve committed to my very first wedding fair and I’ll be holding court on my very own stall. I’ve been invited to present a workshop too, on the entertainment stage! And I cannot begin to describe how very scared I am. Scared, yet still, very, very excited.

So there you have it ladies. Thanks for listening to me ramble on. What a year… Want That Wedding is still moving, still progressing and I would like to thank each and every one of you lovely, lovely people for your continued support. Whether you’re a bride-to-be, a now married or you’re part of this wonderful wedding community…

Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Lots of Love

XxX Sonia

and remember… keep wanting!!