The start of something new
On January 1, 2025, I attended a wedding that changed my life.
The story starts a few weeks earlier, when I got a call from a very close friend. Her Maid of Honor bailed, leaving her hanging. My heart broke for her. She had poured so much intention and care into planning her wedding and wanted nothing more than to be fully present on her day. Her MOH was supposed to make sure that happened.
I was meant to be just a guest.
With tears in her eyes and a shaky voice on the other end of the phone, she told me she needed help. That day, without knowing it, I said yes to a job that would change the trajectory of my life.
When the wedding day arrived, I showed up with bells on. It was a lower-budget, deeply intimate, self-planned wedding. They tied the knot overlooking the Pacific Ocean from a bluff in Santa Barbara, California, surrounded by forty of their closest friends and family. It was breathtaking. So were they.
It became my duty - and my honor - to make sure my bestie had the best day of her life.
The day unfolded into fourteen hours of happy tears, organizing people, setting up and breaking down multiple locations, keeping the timeline moving exactly how she wanted it, and ending the night dancing it all out. When I finally crawled into bed, I felt like I’d just finished a forty-ounce latte. Exhausted…. but buzzing.
How could something so labor-intensive feel so energizing?
The only other time I’d felt that way was years earlier, when I had the opportunity to ordain another friend’s wedding. Was it just because I love my friends so deeply? Maybe, I thought.
But later in the year, I realized something important: it didn’t matter whether I had best-friend rapport or the fondness of a newer connection. Showing up for people on their wedding day is an all-encompassing task - and one that happens to draw on (humble brag) every one of my natural gifts.
No job had ever felt so easy.
Not easy because it lacked hard work, but easy because it finally felt aligned. Like I had found work that didn’t just fill my soul, but wholeheartedly fueled it.
Three weeks later, just days shy of my 30th birthday, I was sitting across from my partner, Ricco, sharing an açaí bowl. I looked at him, eyes welling with tears, and said: This year, I’m becoming a wedding coordinator.
