Putting the ‘Pans’ in Panics

Woo lawd, I am busting my little rump over here trying to get ready for my first major IBJJF competition of the year, and lucky for me, it happens to be one week after my wedding. That was sarcasm by the way, in case you didn’t pick up on it. My brain and body definitely know what to do when it comes to getting ready for large competitions, but I feel exponentially inadequate when it comes to planning nuptials and a ceremony. I’m a planner when it comes to everything else in life, thanks to my ‘Type A’ personality, and it helps me be efficient when it comes to my training, my dietary intake, and my schedule with the gym or when we travel. But what the fuck am I doing when it comes to planning, organizing, and making sure I get hitched without a hitch? I am straight up internally (and maybe even a little bit externally) panicking.

I keep having these dreams where the wedding reception hall is undecorated, or we run out of food, or the photographers don’t show up etc. I wake up exasperated and in a cold sweat, gasping for oxygen to help center me back down to my reality on earth. Training and being at the gym helps, because then my mind doesn’t have time to wander into the realm of ‘what-ifs’ and always honing in on the worst possible scenario. I’m jealous of the people who can live their lives without always thinking something bad is lurking right around the corner, waiting for them to be at their most content and vulnerable before having the rug pulled out from underneath them. My fiancé is one of those people, and man, does he really know how to be in the moment and live his life. Meanwhile I am almost 17 years his junior and definitely have the higher blood pressure between the two of us.

I don’t know why my mind always wanders to the bad things, and I think this is why I like to keep busy 24/7 so I don’t dwell and linger on the negative. Like I will straight up be thinking at the gym “man, wouldn’t it be crazy if this person just landed on my leg weird and my tibia snapped clean in half? Oh, then I would have to limp down the aisle and pull out of competition and ruin the 2 things I am looking forward to most.” Low key kind of hate myself a bit for being like this, so I try and distract myself as much as possible by scheduling grueling workouts and packing every single inch of my day with activity. This is why we are having a massive Open Mat at the gym the day of the wedding. Well, predominantly for two reasons: 1) So that we can still get in that much needed Pans competition prep and 2) So I don’t have free time to sit there with my anxiety panicking about every little thing that could possibly go wrong during the day of wedded bliss.

It’s crazy how incredibly happy I am about being irrevocably in love with my true partner in this life, and I would have been happy running off to sign a marriage certificate in front of a magistrate and being done with it. But now that a wedding is occurring, and I am woefully ignorant on all that entails, I just want to crawl into a ball crying and pleading for help. I really want everyone to have a good time celebrating our union of love with us, and I’m scared I left something unaccounted for or that problems will arise. I was never the girl growing up dreaming of what my wedding would look like, instead I was the girl growing up dreaming of changing the world and dominating any career I chose while being a total badass along the way. Some badass I am, working myself into a sobbing frenzy in fear that I miscalculated the food and drinks and left something major off the check-off list. Weddings are hard, Jiu Jitsu is hard, but there is one of those that I am much more comfortable dealing with the difficulties than the other.

I hope any of my teammates reading this really put it on me for the remainder of this month, so that I can go home figuring how to combat their lasso grips or slick preventative passing skills rather than going home worrying about whether I need flowers or not. We got engaged a year ago and this time period has flown by faster than any other era of my life. I originally thought I had so much time to get everything done and now it is creeping up on me faster than the guy who tries wrist-locking you at every turn. I can’t believe someone as anally retentive as me (when it comes to planning every single minute detail of everything else) is struggling so much when it comes to my own marital plans. In the meantime, I am just going to keep working as hard as possible in the gym to get my body ready for Pans and try my best to keep the panicking at bay because I know that isn’t remotely helpful. Maybe I’ll get lucky and train so much that I am simply too tired to think about anything else and all the wedding stuff will magically just work out. I hope.