From Chaos to Compassion: Finding Your Unique Wedding Style

Written By Leah Weinberg

Ideally, your wedding day will reflect the love between you and your partner. But sometimes, the focus on love gets lost in the shoulds and shouldn’ts that come with traditional wedding planning. 

Throughout wedding planning, it’s important not only to remember your love for your partner but also the love you have for friends and family.  After all,  your wedding is also a day to celebrate that love with friends and family. 

Tashira Halyard, a social justice advocate and the creator of the Politics and Fashion blog, is here to bring some of that perspective back and show you how to create a wedding day that reflects your relationships with your partner as well as family and friends. 

As the creator of the Twenty-One Day Happiness Project toolkit, she also wants to make sure it’s fun and brings you joy. She’s on a mission to help people like you find true happiness, and today she is bringing those skills to your wedding planning journey. 

Craft a Process Rooted in Flexibility and Self Care

It’s easy to get caught up in the chaos that comes with planning your wedding day. 

Life doesn’t pause when wedding planning begins, but it can add stress. Major events don’t even have to be negative to be stressful. Even a promotion at work or a long-awaited move can become stressful with the extra to-dos and expectations that come along with planning a wedding.

Learning to be flexible and make space for those events can help mitigate the emotional toll they take on you. That isn’t to say they won’t still cause stress, but if you’ve done the emotional prep work before you started planning, the emotional toll won’t burn you out. 

Tashira encourages folks to focus on self care by taking a step back and identifying when feelings of stress or lack start to come up. Oftentimes, those feelings emerge from a lack of a quality self-care and taking time out from wedding planning to focus on yourself and your needs. 

Here are some of Tashira’s top tips for creating quality space for yourself

  • Start a mindfulness and meditation practice. You have to get the noise out of your head. If you can’t find calmness inside your own mind, how can you expect to find it while planning a wedding? You have to create that space for yourself.

  • Focus on your own unique version of self-care. Whatever self-care looks like for you, do it! It’s OK for self care to look different for different folks. Some people like a bubble bath, others like a long walk outside. Whatever you do, make sure you are creating and honoring time and space for yourself. 

  • Find small smiles. Finding small acts that bring a smile to your face go far in reducing stress and overwhelm. Focusing on the little things helps to ground and generate feelings of gratitude. Gratitude is a quick antidote for feeling overwhelmed. 

  • Take a time out. Feel yourself going off the deep end? Take a break. It’s okay to stop planning for a moment. Push your date back if necessary. You can’t create a wedding that honors and reflects you and your partner’s relationship if you lose yourself in the process. 

Honor and Respect Your Unique Style

Finding the perfect wedding attire is daunting. There are so many outward expectations and ideas of what you should wear. Tashira, who is also a fashion blogger,  encourages folks to ignore those things and focus on you. Including:

  • Feel comfortable. You should feel comfortable in what you chose to wear. That doesn’t necessarily mean sweatpants, but it can if you want it to. Make sure that what you chose to wear feels right and comfortable to you. If you aren’t comfortable, it will show on your face in the photos. You want to be able to have fun on your wedding day and show it! So make sure you feel good.

  • Remember your style.  Find what speaks to you and your personality. Don’t force it. You don’t have to wear what society and traditional tell you you’re supposed to wear for a wedding. Wear what feels right to you. 

  • Don’t Radically Change Yourself. Your partner fell in love with you and that is the point of this celebration. You shouldn’t feel the need to go on an extreme diet or make a drastic change to your appearance. Oftentimes these diets can cause unnecessary stress and add to a deterioration of your mental health leading up to your wedding day.

When you make self-care and authenticity your focus, you turn wedding planning chaos into compassion, for both yourself and the ones you love. The result is an honest and heartfelt day that you and your partner get to celebrate with friends and family. 

Mentioned in this interview

Where to find Tashira

Leah Weinberg
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