It’s been just over three years since we were regularly posting here on Beard & Bloom, and so much has happened since then, it’s hard to think of where to start! We’ve experienced so many life events and, like I’m sure many of you, often talk about how we sometimes hardly recognize the people we were and the life we had before the craziness of 2020 ensued. But it’s starting to feel like we’ve made it out on the other side, and in our case, though many wonderful things have happened, we’re keeping all our fingers crossed that we’re entering a phase of catching a much-needed break. Before we dive into all the amazing things that have happened (our wedding and the weddings of many friends, the addition of a few nieces and nephews into our family, travel, and more), I thought it best to get all the uglies out of the way first. I’d rather dump it all in one go so they’re not peppered in with future posts about the better parts of life, and because I know this will be one of the harder posts to write and I want to get it out of the way!
Again, we recognize life has been a lot for everyone and don’t want to share some of the darker pieces of our story for pity, but for transparency about why we may have been a bit down and distant, and more importantly, for connection. If you’ve dealt with any of these kinds of experiences or feelings in recent years, perhaps our sharing will help you feel less alone (and open the door if you’d ever like to talk to someone who can relate). And honestly, I’ve been needing a good venting session and wanting to document this all for my future self to look back on.
In short, the past few years have tested us in every area of our lives. We’ve seen the worst in people, including people we love dearly. We’ve lost several friends to suicide, been directly involved with a couple attempted suicides, and struggled to help loved ones through addictions and hardships while battling our own demons. We’ve been taken advantage of financially. We’ve had multiple cancer scares within our family. It’s been a lot.
2020
In December of 2019. Jeremy proposed just before Christmas and we had the most magical holiday season sharing the news with all our friends and family. We jumped right into wedding planning to begin the year. We were leaning heavily toward eloping to Ireland, but wanted to book a venue just in case, for whatever reason, that didn’t work out. We toured a few and immediately agreed on one we loved, and put the deposit down for a date in 2021, which felt like forever away at the time, on March 14. Little did we know what laid in wait in the days ahead. That following Monday, I was on the road to a city a few hours away for a work trip when my beloved Beetle took its final breath on the interstate. I had already been looking at vehicles, thinking I may get one in the next year or two when I was feeling better money-wise, but was forced to bite the bullet and bought one the very next day. Two days after that, the state of Indiana began closing down due to the COVID pandemic, starting with the service industry, which sent us panicking, given that’s Jeremy’s profession.
Fortunately, both of our workplaces were able to accommodate the lockdowns and we were able to continue working. Actually, we ended up working more than we ever have in our lives. Jeremy’s main workplace took to beer delivery for a time and focused on interior renovations, but with limited staff, he was gone all hours of the day and night. And with my role being in the financial industry, which went absolutely haywire with all kind of unknowns almost immediately, the most crucial need in that first year was communications of every kind—which is what I do! We had also just started the process of acquiring another bank, and with the two combined focuses, I literally don’t remember doing anything else from March through September of that year but working from the time I got out of bed until I crawled back in it. I burnt out, hard. We both admittedly did a lot of soul searching during that time and questioned whether or not these industries were where we wanted to be long-term. Fortunately, we both stuck it out and we’re feeling better about that now (most days, anyway)!
Needless to say, wedding planning all but came to a halt. We watched helplessly as several friends and family who had weddings planned for 2020 had to reschedule, deal with vendors bailing and venues closing, keep an eye on gathering size limits, and more. We felt thankful that we were looking at a 2021 wedding, in hopes we wouldn’t be affected by the madness, but continued to teeter back and forth on eloping or moving forward with planning more traditional wedding. We felt hesitant about both, given the state of the world.
However, we were focused on saving any penny we could for the wedding, regardless of where it was going to happen, and making some progress. That is, until October, when Jeremy’s car was totaled, and he had to unexpectedly find a new one, too. And then November, when our ancient furnace gave out and we had to completely replace our entire HVAC. We were down to nothing going into the holidays.
As the year wrapped up, we felt conflicted about the entire holiday season. While we certainly missed spending Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s with loved ones, it was an extra cozy season for us and we took full advantage of it being just the two of us at home. I lost count of how many movies we watched, how many days straight I lived in pajamas, how many puzzles Jeremy completed, and how many holiday sweets I consumed. It forced us to see the holidays for what they should be (a time to slow down and simply be together) rather than what they tend to turn into (stressful, materialistic, and rushed). We’ve since made it a pact that we have to enjoy at least two days during the holiday season doing just those things, just the two of us, as we rarely get the opportunity to stay cooped up together any other time of year. For all its bummers, the pandemic and the lockdowns certainly taught us the value in slowing our roll and appreciating what we have within our own four walls.
2021
We kicked off 2021 with more hope than 2020, especially when the COVID vaccines started rolling out. We took advantage as soon as we could, and by March, started talking wedding planning again. Were we doing this thing this year or not? When it came to the possibility of eloping, every week was different. Travel restrictions in Ireland were on and off, with a prolonged quarantine required for any visitors no matter what. That, coupled with tension building between Russia and the Ukraine causing concerns with flying and wildly fluctuating airline pricing and rules, left us feeling really uneasy about traveling abroad. On the flip side, when we talked about having a traditional wedding, our initial guest list neared 400, and the state and county’s COVID protocols on gathering size limits were still very back and forth, too. We knew if we were hosting a wedding with family and friends, we wanted to go all out. So we moved forward with a plan to have our wedding in Indiana, at the venue we’d already booked, and started aggressively slicing away at our guest list. There was so much uncertainty during the planning stages, and with so many 2020 couples moving their dates to 2021, we were left with very few options for vendors. I still can’t believe we managed it, but with most of our planning and booking not really starting until April, and all the hurdles presented by the pandemic, we pulled together our dream wedding in the matter of about six months.
That spring and summer was a whirlwind and a mix of emotions. We were vaccinated. The world was slowly getting back to normal. We were seeing friends and family that we hadn’t seen in months. But we also unexpectedly lost two of those dear friends to suicide within weeks of each other. And came close to losing one of our closest family members in the same way, in that same stretch of time.
After replacing our HVAC late in 2020, knowing we’d just boosted the value of our home, we did a cash-out refinance, taking advantage of the record-low rates (which is certainly a silver lining and how we were able to pay for our wedding), but it also allowed us to fix our porch, which was becoming more than an eyesore, it was becoming unsafe. There were continued issues found with it during construction, which extended the work by several weeks and the cost by several thousands. While the contractor did beautiful work, it almost immediately started having some issues, which we still haven’t gotten fixed, because he’s all but ghosted us (we’re taking general contractor recommendations, by the way).
All things felt right come fall, though. September was full of last minute wedding planning and pre-wedding celebrations. The wedding came together beautifully, and I’ll be sharing more of the details about that season and that day soon! September and October were truly magical. We were thrilled to spend wedding week and the day-of with the most precious people in our lives, many traveling from across state lines to join us. It was the first major gathering most of us had experienced in well over a year. Sadly, we were missing a few key people due to COVID and a couple of friends who passed shortly before the big day, but know they were there in spirit.
However, this season also resulted in some shattered relationships. Despite the warnings from others who had gotten married before us, never in my life did I think that any of our closest friends or family members would make this season of our lives about themselves and intentionally cause us and others heartbreak, but sure enough, it happened. While we didn’t let this overshadow the day itself, we spent a lot of time hurt and mourning in the weeks leading up to the wedding, and are still picking up the pieces today.
A few weeks after our wedding, our photographer reached out and told us she’d lost all our photos due to a corrupted SD card. I’ll share more on this in detail later in another post, but in short, it progressively got worse and worse from there, believe it or not. And we’ve yet to close this chapter. Leading up to our wedding, she’d failed to make our engagement photos happen and was difficult to reach ahead of the big day, but I held out hope the finished product would be worth the rocky start. This climax was the ultimate loss, but we got kicked around a little more while we were down. She and her husband, who’d done the videography, said they’d pull stills from the video footage for us in place of photos, but we never got those either. We asked for the raw video footage so we could do it ourselves, and months later, they told us they’d actually lost that, too.
What should have been our honeymoon phase post-wedding was a season of deep depression. The weight of our friends’ passings, broken relationships, no wedding photos to look back on, and finally catching COVID (and many friends and family catching it to end the year, too) had us feeling really, really low to end the year and dulled any shine of welcoming a new one.
2022
In 2022, we attempted to climb out of the darkness and started talking about travel and other plans. Come spring, I decided to visit my best friend in Charlotte for a week for a mental reset, and my first day away from home, Jeremy called me at 3AM to let me know that someone had broken the glass on our front door, reached in to unlock it, and walked into our house while he and Rosie were in it. He was upstairs and came down to discover the intruder in our kitchen, drunkenly yelling about a girl living here (who obviously doesn’t), while Rosie hid, terrified, under the couch (Jeremy thought she ran out and went missing, only to find her there later). Although the police were quick to arrive and our neighbor chased the guy on foot for awhile, he was never caught. Jeremy went back and forth with the police for months and finally got to the point of getting to identify him in a line-up, but unfortunately, the dude wasn’t there and the case went cold. I thank our lucky stars every day that this wasn’t an armed or violent robbery, but it’s had a lingering impact, and we’ve still been going over the top to ensure no unwanted guest can break into our safe space again.
The day after the break-in, one of Jeremy’s friends went missing. A couple days later, he was found, having taken his own life.
Throughout the year, there was a months-long back and forth regarding the wedding photo ordeal. Long story short, the couple ghosted us when we asked for a refund to start the year. From there, we went through four different lawyers until we found one who could represent us (more on that later), sent demand letters, and ultimately ended up in court a few days before our one-year anniversary. We won, but have yet to be paid.
The end to 2022 was fairly quiet, and we welcomed the boringness of it all. We had a low-key day to celebrate our anniversary, took a trip to Florida for a work conference and tacked on a few days in St. Augustine, threw our first Halloween party, and spent the holidays with friends and family.
2023
A few days into 2023, we were dealing with suicide in our lives once again, with a days-long series of threats and attempts from a loved one, in which we were in conversations with them, police, and emergency services to locate them so they could get the help they needed. Fortunately, they did. In the span of a couple years, suicide had taken several friends, and had nearly taken two of our closest family members. It goes without saying, but navigating each of these situations has had a tremendous impact on our mental health since 2021.
In the spring, I made yet another solo trip, this time to Charleston for a music festival. The day before I left, Rosie had what was supposed to be a routine dental surgery. It was anything but. She had back-to-back seizures that night, and I was beside myself, deciding whether or not to cancel my trip. Jeremy encouraged me to go, and that he’d take good care of her. In the week I was gone, he took her to the vet multiple times. She’d developed a bacterial infection and was incredibly sick. Her eyes were swollen shut, she wasn’t eating, and was in pain for days on end. He only told me after I got home that he had a period where he genuinely thought she wouldn’t make it. She continues to have some lingering issues, whether related or not, that are leaving the vet completely stumped.
This summer, we’ve both had parents diagnosed with cancer (the good news is, both were caught early, they’re getting ahead of it and, as of my writing this, are doing well)! In our latest round of visits at the vet, we were told that cancer was a likely cause of what’s been going on with Rosie, too, with everything else ruled out. This hit extra hard given we were already worried about our parents in this capacity. We’re so incredibly relieved to report that after a series of tests a couple weeks ago, they didn’t find the tumor they were expecting. So while we still don’t have answers about our girl, we’ve eliminated the one we were praying not to find.
And that brings us to present day. I don’t have to remind you of all the other national and worldwide events that have taken place in those years, too. As extreme empaths, the political, economical, and environmental climates have left us feeling all sorts of ways, too. On top of, you know, all the standard, daily life stuff. I wish I could say that we’ve focused on seeing the positives in all this and each situation has made us stronger, better people, but I’d be lying. While I tend to believe most everything happens for a reason and try not to let bad luck break my spirit, there are definitely times now when I believe some things just… happen.
But I will say this: We’ve gained so much more appreciation for the time we have with the people we love; and have realized how surrounded we are with genuinely wonderful people who have showed up time and again, in all the ways we’ve needed them through everything. We’ve recognized how lucky we were to weather the storm of the pandemic (physically, mentally, and financially). We’ve learned that we need to be more bold in speaking up for what we believe in and what we want, and to take a stand against being walked all over and treated like shit. We’ve stopped tolerating the toxicity in our relationships, even if that means showing loved ones. the door when we need to. We’ve learned to pause more frequently in the moment and take in and feel grateful for all we have and all we’re experiencing.
Thank you for letting me share with you the raw bits of our lives for the past few years. I promise, it’s all up from here! We have so much to share about those in-between, light-filled moments and experiences. We’ve continued to live our lives the best we could amidst all the downswings, and will be sure to document that, too. And move forward with hope and a lighter pep in our step, because I fully believe the tides are turning.
I hope your past few years have been filled with plenty of light in between any of the dark phases you may have had, friends. And know that if you’ve felt burnt out, annoyed, ungrateful, angry, frustrated, tired, any of the above, for whatever reasons, your feelings are valid and you’re worthy of better. I hope you find it in you to fight for what you deserve and to keep moving forward as well. Because sooner or later, the tides will turn for you, too. Promise.
—Aly
If life is feeling extra heavy for you or someone you love, please don’t hesitate to seek help. Please don’t suffer in silence. So many resources are available and so many people care. Click here for support.
Photo by Bambi Guthrie Photography (who is NOT the photographer who lost our photos, by the way; she took our gorgeous make-ups)!