I remember January 20, 2009 like it was yesterday.  I was at work and we were all crowded around the TV to watch Obama being sworn in.  I had missed the memo that he was swearing in on Lincoln’s Bible until moments before it was happening.  Watching Obama put his hand on Lincoln’s Bible was the socio-political experience I didn’t know I needed.  I needed to witness that particular demonstration.  I needed to see that black man being ushered into the very same position as the president who freed the slaves.  Obama’s hand.  Lincoln’s hand.  The same Bible. I cried.

Most of my co-workers were dry-eyed.  One of my co-workers looked shocked by my tears. I was wondering why everyone wasn’t moved in the same way.  You didn’t have to be a Democrat to recognize that that moment was like nothing else we’ve ever seen in the Presidency. Bueller?  Bueller? 

Is the thought that we can all be united if just for a moment too idealistic?  I understand that our bitter partisanship has divided us like nobody’s business.  Not much has changed in the years since Obama’s first inauguration.  But I would like to know if we are free enough to be moved by anything that lies outside our own purview.  If so, please share with me what moves you.

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It was the 11^th grade and I was running for class president.  This would be my first attempt at running for student government.  We had to give a speech in front of the entire class stating why people should vote for us.  I got to the podium and straight up froze.  You can’t really classify what came out of my mouth as words; it was verbal gobbly-gook.  I wasn’t making any sense while desperately trying to.  I still remember the look of distressed confusion on Marisol’s face.  As you can guess, I was not elected that year.  Ever since then, whenever I feel nervous speaking in front of others, I remind myself that whatever I say is already better than the 11^th grade.

I was always fascinated by people who seemed to have no fear of public speaking.  But then I began to admire the people who were able to stand up in front of others and tell the truth about themselves.  I have many a friend who has done this remarkably well.  My friend Harmony created a non-profit called Treasures helping women get out of the sex industry and it all started with her telling the truth about her own life.  My friend Ashley wrote a whole book about telling the truth about yourself, aptly named Rise of the Truth Teller.

Stories are in us and they need to be told.  I recently attended a speaker series event called BOLD whose mission is for us to know that we are empowered through our vulnerability.  Hold up!  Wait a minute!!  That’s not how most of us operate in this here world.  Growing up, most of us certainly weren’t encouraged to be that open with others.  I grew up pre-black girl magic in a time where most black girls were directly and indirectly taught that our identity would fall into one of two boxes:  either the ‘strong black woman’ or the ‘angry black woman’.  But neither of those boxes allows for you to be your authentic self.  Maybe you’re reading this and you can identify in some way.  Maybe you’ve grown up learning to be seen and not heard.  Maybe you’re so well practiced at keeping things to yourself, the thought of speaking up feels more like fantasy than reality.  Maybe you can picture yourself being bold but in real life, you’ve been more like Shy Ronnie.

These past few years have been an exercise in overcoming my silence.  It’s partly the reason why I started blogging.  Every time I write something for others to know that they are not alone, I am also reminding myself that I, in particular, need to say it.  We must start telling our stories.  They matter.  And if you’re prone to believe that no one cares, please know that the first person that has to care is you; get that straight and expand from there.  What’s your story?  Please start telling it. 

When people talk about ‘finding your voice’, I translate that to mean knowing your value.  My 16 year-old self didn’t give up after a rough start and decades later, she is still working out some kinks.  Friend, especially my Introverted Friends, I’m curious.  How do you go about developing and strengthening your voice?  Comment below, even if your answer is “I have no idea”.  I’d love to know what you do to speak up.

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Yesterday was one of those rough ones. You know the kind. The one where you pile on ten more problems for every one thing you accomplish. Yeah, that kind of day. On days like these, I tend take deeper breaths, pray, think too much, and cry. I also like to find quick little spirit lifters: a deep thought someone shares, a hilarious video, etc., a nice convo with my husband (which could do the trick if he’s not facing the same ish storm that I am.)

There are people that I hold so very, very close to my heart because of their love for humanity. They use their gifts to help others. And I draw inspiration from them on the daily and, most especially, when things are bleak.

So you can imagine my utter dismay when at the tail end of an emotionally curl-up-in-a-ball day, my husband says to me, “Ta-Nehisi Coates has left Twitter.” And why did he leave Twitter? The only explanation offered by Coates was that he “didn’t get in it for this.” And what is “this” you ask? From what I understand, it is the onslaught of eerily wide-ranged criticism he has received in the past couple of days from all walks of life, from high profile cats to the everyday joe/jane.

I can hear the clapbacks a’flying: “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen”, “That’s what you sign up for when you’re a public figure”, “Aaaah, little Ta-Nehisi Coates got his little feelings hurt; man up!” [cue violins]. If you ascribe to any of the aforementioned opinions, please tell me what has happened to the part of your conscience that reminds us all that kindness, even in moments like these, is essential. I ask because I believe it is the benchmark from which all comments should flow. If your opinion lacks civility and care for your fellow human being then perhaps it really doesn’t need to be said. Out loud. At all. Ever.

I’m not looking for a world where we only gas each other up.  We all need constructive feedback; it is elementary to civil discourse, but what is considered to be constructive, unfortunately, is subjective. In the world of healthy boundaries, there has got to be a distinction we make between what we need to say and what we want to say.

What we need to say (helpful): discussion points that are relevant to the matter at hand; questions/comments to provide clarity

What we want to say (not helpful, emotionally immature): sharing our opinion because we keep it 100; giving someone a piece of our mind with no care for the potential harm, putting someone on blast via social media without bothering to connect with them personally first; valuing the clapback as more important than the conversation.

So what are the rules of engagement for appropriate discourse? Unfortunately, there are none. But I would like to create some. And I am just foolish (or revolutionary, depending how you look at it) enough to think that there are some people out their who give a damn, too, and would like to reclaim online civility.  So here goes:

3 Self-Imposed Think Before You Post Boundaries

1. If you need to vent, social media is not your starting point. God created best friends, confidantes, wise people, therapy, punching bags and many, many other avenues for us to release our frustrations. Don’t use someone else’s online account to intellectually vomit all over them, no matter how justified you feel it is.
2. Are you jealous? If you were quick to say no, ask yourself again and be courageous to find your ‘yes.’ Maybe this person has a little too much shine for your tastes and you can list all of the ways that they don’t deserve it. Or maybe you just wish you had their shine. The jealousy question is sometimes brought up to discredit someone’s unpopular comment.  I don’t mean it in that way.  I mean it in the soul-searching, if I stop-defending-myself-and-just sit-in-the-honest-truth-about-myself kind of way.
3. I wasn’t born when the TV show Dragnet premiered but I know its famous tagline and I will use it here: “Just the facts…..just the facts.” If you are not well-studied in an area, perhaps you should get somewhere, sit down, read, study, research, engage in a civil discourse with a friend who has done the same, study some more, think about all you have learned and then venture to share an opinion IN THAT ORDER and not the other way around. Speak last, not first.

In the end, all I’m really saying is funneled from one thought. It is an almost dead truism but it is so necessary to see its revival. And we all learned it by age five. Most of us have heard our whole lives “If you don’t have anything nice to say (or if you can’t say anything nice), don’t say anything at all.” And yet we grow up and do the opposite. Nice doesn’t mean we all hold hands skipping down the street with glee.  Nice is intense care for the words we use.  Nice is holding our opinion because although we “know” we’re right, we also know nothing truly productive will come from our sharing our rightness.  Nice is a conversation with the actual person before posting a comment for the world’s consumption.  What I’m asking is that we all dig down deep and find the humanity within ourselves that cares more about the effect of our words than the freedom to share them.

If this is all sounding a little too “can’t we all just get alongish?”, it is the how we get along in the midst of disagreement that kept me up last night. Yesterday one of the voices I respect the most has shut it down, not because he can’t take the heat, but he can’t stomach what our sense of civil discourse has become. I can’t be the only one concerned. We all should be.

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“Are we going to jump the broom?” Angelo asked me that question trying his best to sound neutral but I knew his answer. We were both hoping the other person wanted to do it. It was one of my favorite conversations during our wedding planning process. On the one hand is the ancestral significance and on the other hand is the very present jump from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ Angelo’s personal vows to me (which received and deserved uproarious applause) spoke to that journey: the acknowledgment of the past, the switch from ‘I’ to ‘we’ and the foundation we lay for our future.

If you are planning a wedding, it is my prayer that you have a few special moments in the midst of the craziness. I hope these last few tips help you plan your special day with more ease.

What He Wants Matters
There’s one thing missing from the “It’s your day” bridal motto: the groom. Isn’t he getting married too?! Isn’t this also the biggest day of his life? If I was marrying myself, maybe it can be it all about me. But since there is a dude involved, he should have a say too, right?!

All my life I ascribed to the “It’s your (the bride) day” philosophy. The first time that belief was challenged was when Angelo had an opinion about something related to the wedding and I thought, “that’s odd!.” It wasn’t the content of his comment that I found strange; I just found it odd that he was actively engaged in the planning. I mean, don’t the guys get dragged everywhere against their will?

My perspective officially changed when Angelo and I were in a vendor meeting and the vendor turned to me and said, “Well, it’s your day so what do you want?” Sitting directly across from me was my fiancé and it was then that I made the more than obvious realization: I am marrying him; how could this possibly be just my day?!

I need a historian or a sociologist to verify this thought, but it seems the bride only focus was some sort of momentary counter balance to the patriarchal encounter that would be the rest of her life. If that’s the case, then “It’s The Bride’s Day” is sooo pre- 21^st century.

I know ladies! It’s tough!! We were sold a false bill of goods our whole life and it’s hard to let go of because, let’s be real, who doesn’t want a day that is all about them?! But repeat after me: What He Wants Matters, What He Wants Matters… Get this in your system now so you don’t have to say goodbye to your seemingly justifiable self-centeredness in the middle of the planning process…. What He Wants Matters….What He Wants Matters….

The Inner Life of a Bridezilla
I used to think these women were the shining example of unfairness for single girls. My friend Carmella and I used to watch the show together and talk mad smack about their trifling ways. But after planning a wedding in 3 months, I have discovered the place of empathy. Underneath the layers of ratchetness is just a girl who wants the wedding of her dreams. Now I don’t identify with being ratchet; that’s a choice of behavior. But what I do own is the frustration of trying your best to make plans and hitting so many hurdles along the way combined with the haze of feeling overwhelmed by the unyielding list of things to do in the process.

Have you ever looked forward to something for days, months or years? Spent too many moments to count dreaming of what that day would look and feel like? That’s an expectation, my friend, and it’s easier said than done to say goodbye to one that has lived inside of you for so long. That is the dilemma every bride or groom endures; there is no wedding I know of (regardless of budget) where some (hopefully tiny) part of the dream doesn’t have to alter or die for some reason or other. How you handle those disappointments is what distinguishes you as a bride or a bridezilla (or groom/groomzilla).

Colors
Did you know that you can have more than two colors for your wedding? I sure didn’t when we got started. I believed the unspoken 2 color maximum rule. The first time somebody asked me about our colors, which were purple, charcoal, champagne and yellow, I prepared to hear that we were doing too much. But surprisingly everyone who asked (and there were many) seemed to love the color scheme. In any event, it is apparently okay to have as many colors as you want. J

Laughter Is the Best Medicine
Planning a wedding is fantastically stressful. I remember a friend told me that she didn’t care for the planning part of her wedding. Yes, now I get her! There are soooooo many unexpected ancillary aspects to getting married. Unless you have unlimited funds, you’re trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents. And then there’s figuring out who you’re not going to invite which is socially horrifying if you’re a people pleaser. There is a magnitude of opportunities for mental distress. Laughter is a Godsend and hallelujah—it’s free!

We were over budget in our wedding. We had a couple of unexpected expenses so our budget was not only red, but red & flashing. We were in a bit of a bind because the venue we used required us to use one of their caterers. Unfortunately, none of them were in our budget. While very low on options, one catering manager got back to me and told me the best she could do was double our budget limit. I remember dreading the phone call to Angelo telling him the news. He paused for a moment and then started laughing. And then he laughed louder. And then he laughed some more. And although we still had the problem, life didn’t suck as much. The laughter didn’t in any way solve our problem; but it did lighten the load of gloom surrounding us. Sometimes, you can soften the intensity of the suckiness. [FYI: We received a Hail Mary in the 11^th hour as one caterer came within our budget.]

You Have One Job the Day of Your Wedding
The #1 piece of advice I heard from past brides was to enjoy the day. Yes, your wedding day will have trouble of its own [see Crazy Happens]. Your only job for this day is to soak and indulge in every second of wedding day euphoric bliss. That’s it! If you start to worry about anything, stop yourself immediately and reclaim your bliss. Your wedding day goes by soooooo fast; please enjoy every second!

Dear Single People Who Are Looking to Get Married Someday: I hope you archive these tips and refer back to them when Mr. or Mrs. Right comes your way. And if it can spare you from a tiny bit of undue stress, my mission is accomplished.

The post Staying in Your Happy Place While Planning a Wedding, Pt. 2 appeared first on Jocelyn Jackson Williams.

I was a wedding coordinator for a year. One would think that when the time came to plan my own wedding, I would have been fully prepared for that full time job. But there were quite a few times in the planning process that I felt brand new. When it’s your special day, no amount of wedding planning expertise saves you from the unyielding onslaught of decisions to be made and the corresponding feelings of excitement, fear & everything in between.

I am the type of person that likes to feel prepared for every moment that comes my way. The more prepared I am, the more I feel like I’m winning. With all the unexpected obstacles that surfaced, winning often felt like a pipe dream. That’s when I needed the wisdom of wedding planning gurus who have gone before me. The help of both friends and vendors proved to be invaluable. With the preponderance of advice flying around me, you would think I was prepared for any possible scenario. With the preponderance of advice flying around me, you would think I was prepared for any possible scenario. And yet I still had to learn some things on the fly. I kept a mental list of the major stuff and now I pass on these particular tips to you:

Best Money You Can Spend on Your Wedding

Okay! If you don’t heed anything else I say, please Please PLEASE listen to this one: no matter how organized you are or no matter how broke you might be, you absolutely, positively need a wedding coordinator or planner.

I’m not saying you need someone to plan your wedding; but you do need someone the day of. If your decision to hire someone is strictly a budget issue, figure out your moola situation but make it happen! Drive Lyft for a month, sell lemonade, do whatever you have to do to make it happen. An easy way to save money on a coordinator is for you and the homies to do all the work leading up to the day and hire someone for the day-of needs. Or if you know someone who is super organized that would be willing to donate his/her skills day-of, do that. Whatever you do, you CANNOT be the person coordinating vendors and solving problems on your wedding day. My wedding coordinator hid things from me the day of the wedding so I was free to just be happy. That’s what every bride and groom deserves.

Budget Braggers & Busters

Braggers: When you’re in the throws of wedding planning, people will ask how it’s going. But not everybody has the same benevolent curiosity. Although I can’t prove it, some married folk enjoy having the conversation with you so they can brag about what a good deal they got for their own wedding (or try make themselves feel better about how much they spent.)

It took me a while to figure out why I was so irritated with certain vendors’ pricing. It was because I remembered that Sally told me she paid $2 for all her flowers and Maria fed 100 guests for $100. Comparison chokes the life out of your happiness so do yourself a favor and focus on your budget and no one else’s.

Busters: Don’t do it. Don’t bust your budget. (We did it. And it hurt. We don’t have any regrets but we also don’t have any more money. Who knew that my bank account could remind me of my early twenties???) Like for real, for real, before you plan anything, tally your available cash flow and then get pricing for all the things that you want. And then if you have more ideas/needs than money, be very slow to use a credit card to solve your dilemma. Nothing will pop that newlywed bliss bubble faster than when that Amex statement comes in the mail.   Bless your marriage by starting it off as debt-free as humanly possible.

Crazy Happens

I decided to get acrylic nails (for the first time) for the wedding. Two days before walking down the aisle, one of the nails came off and took half of my real nail with it. Yes, it did hurt as much as you’re imagining right now! I went back to the nail shop and they refused to fix it for fear of infection. So we went to Walgreens and got today’s version of a Lee Press On Nail. On my wedding day, I had 9 beautiful hombre nails and one French nail impostor. As much as I could, I would hide my impostor finger in pictures. In all my dreams for my wedding day, I never thought that I would have to play hide the mismatched finger.

My finger wasn’t the only dose of crazy. Multiple key members of the wedding were 90 minutes late, I lost my checkbook & couldn’t pay a couple of the vendors, and the baker forgot to decorate a tier of our cake, to name a few key WTFs.

I mention this because it’s vitally important to acknowledge that on your perfect day, crazy, disappointing, annoying ish is going to happen. Once you accept that fact, nothing will be able to ruin your day.

It’s Not Your Vendor’s Day

If you’re the kind of person that wants to just show up on your wedding day enjoying whatever the vendors created on your behalf, you can skip this one altogether. This piece of advice is for brides who have imagined having an ice sculpture at their reception or re-making the dance routine from Coming to America or any other fabulous idea that has been running around your mind for years. Unfortunately, not everybody is going to give a rip about your fabulous ideas and that is why it’s essential to ask the following question before booking any vendor: “Do you customize your services?” If the answer is no, don’t try to sell them on your vision; simply thank them for their time and find somebody else.

A few times I was told, “we can’t do that.” When I pressed the issue, I found out that the vendor didn’t feel confident doing something they’ve never done before. There is a difference between impossibility and incapability; find out which one you are working with. Be forewarned, some vendors would like you to pay them money to produce the wedding of their comfort. So should you sign a contract with a vendor and then run into some resistance, fight the good fight and have your wedding coordinator back you up [see Best Money You Can Spend on Your Wedding section].

Prepare for Your Marriage

Years ago, I had the privilege of running classes for my church. One of those classes was for couples looking to get married and for married folk looking for help with their marriage. Let’s say the class was like an intellectual marriage boot camp with numerous marriage workout stations (communication, finances, respect, etc.) There would be some stations where some couples either didn’t see eye to eye or they hadn’t yet gotten around to talking about that particular topic. Discovering the topics that needed to be addressed reminded of that game show ‘Press Your Luck’ where the contestants hoped to win one of the many prizes flashing on the big screen in front of them. So they hit their button and one prize would be selected on the screen. But sometimes the prize on the screen would quickly turn into a whammy and they would lose everything. I started thinking that a pre-marital class would go a long way in keeping away some of the relationship whammies. What I witnessed in those classes as a single person caused me to see that pre-marital instruction is just wisdom served up on a platter. And why wouldn’t my future spouse and I not want a piece of that?!

Angelo beat me to the punch. When we were dating, he asked me, “Shouldn’t we talk to someone wiser than us and do some sort of pre-marital counseling?” And so we did. We took a premarital class where we had to fill out an intensely thorough questionnaire that got into all our business: fidelity, past abuse, finances, emotional & physical health, appearance & attractiveness, etc. You name it, it was a question we had to answer. We had to fill it out separately and then share our answers with one another. One question was so uncomfortable, neither one of us answered it. But we forced ourselves to be that honest with one another and it set the standard for our marriage that we will spend the rest of our lives trying to uphold. Given that the planning your wedding is all kinds of time consuming, your marriage deserves the same intensity of preparation.

More to Come
I thought I would give a few little pointers but I’m just warming up. This blog is going to be a two parter because apparently, I have much to say….

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