So how do I say this?

By Aneesah, 20 Feb 14

Assalamu’alaikum, hello (pronounced “hell-loww~”),

I thought I would come back to the blogging world with big news. B-I-G. BIIIG NEWSSS.

In the past year, a lot of things have happened in my life. As with everybody else’s lives of course, but let’s just say these particular 12 months stood out in my 25 years of living. I’ve successfully started and semi-sustained a habit of sketching/doodling and making semi-good use of the results, I went traveling to some especially beautiful places in the world (Croatia, Malta and Morocco. Oh, and Disneyland 😉 ), I experienced bouts of depression and anxiety due to my academic troubles that led me to applying for a concession for a design module, and still managed to fail it even with the extended deadline, “it” being the biggest credit-bearing module of my fourth year in architecture school, I tasted the bitter taste of disappointment and learned the hard reality of my first major failure in life, I had to go through some rather taxing procedures with my sponsor in order to be granted permission to retake the module and extend my course by a whole year, but by Allah’s will, it was successful, I was left with an empty academic term and took up a Mandarin class to fill it up and to enable me to remain in the country as a student, I enjoyed said language course immensely and totally scored the final exam, I received a marriage proposal in April, had an online “engagement ceremony” in June, and married my childhood friend of 20 years the next January.

Yes friends, alhamdulillah I am 25, still a struggling architecture student, and happily married. 🙂

I have kept personal matters far, far out of blog entries for a long time now, but I do think there is great benefit in sharing stories. The story of Zakwan and I is … long, to say the least. My best friend keeps saying I should write a book out of it, I think I should start with blog entries because naturally, it breaks up the task into small, consistent chunks, but — the grand total number of draft entries I’ve written as part of Our Story is: one.

😛

So I guess the backstory can always come later and I can just share the more recent events with you. 🙂

We (I) made a wedding website for the whole thing, which is still here and which holds our photo gallery etc. etc. Feel free to browse to your heart’s content.

I plan to blog about all sorts of things involving getting married, because Lord knows it’s such a truckload of work; getting married. -_-; Topics I’ve thought about include:

• Initial Planning — methods of communication and collaboration, research, inspiration, design work…
• DIY — although I was in the UK until like 11 days before the wedding (which was in Malaysia), we still crafted some elements by hand and of course I’d share those parts with you. 😀
• Dresses — because everybody cares about wedding dresses.
• Other preparations / shopping — especially nearing the date and as last-minute as it gets.
• The Days Themselves — in my case, the nikah (solemnisation) ceremony and walimah (reception, which we only had one [most people have two: one held by the bride’s family and one by the groom’s]).

All in all, the time leading to becoming a married person was so, so full of beautiful wishes and prayers and probing questions about how I feel (SO ANNOYING 😛 ), and such kind gifts and words of advice… It is only from those prayers and God’s plans that everything went so smoothly (I DID NOT LOOK OLD IN MAKE-UP! PRAISE THE LORD!), up till our flight back to the UK and now living semi-separately (we meet up on weekends 🙂 ) but as husband and wife.

I was seriously in denial throughout a lot of those months, and even now it’s mind-boggling to accept reality, especially considering how quickly and simply things happened. SubhanAllah walhamdulillah.

To be continued…