The Importance of Enjoying Celebration
Are you cherishing celebrations or are you letting them consume you? Making sense of why we let moments meant to be commemorated become moments full of trickling anxiety, and how that shouldn’t be the case.
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There’s a certain aspect to planning a celebration that is more exciting than the celebration itself. That’s why there’s often that feeling of emptiness or withdrawal after the celebration is done; especially if it's a milestone for a person’s life. However, the bigger the celebration, the more anxiety and excitement is associated with the planning process, often consuming the people involved. This changes the entire concept of actually enjoying a celebration.
It’s interesting to see how similar or the same celebrations still tend to differ between different cultures. In most cultures, weddings are often a triumphant celebration that comes with tons of excitement and anxiety, but nothing compares to the feelings that come from wedding celebrations in my culture. I come from a South Asian background, and in my culture there’s a lot of time, energy, and money put into planning a wedding. Most of the time, there are at least three different ceremonies that are planned to commemorate the couple getting married—each of them having a different theme or meaning—and require even more time, energy, and money than what most people expect. As such, I can arguably say I’ve first-handedly witnessed the most exaggerated and melodramatic anxiety episodes that were the outcome of simply planning a wedding. These emotions were rightfully experienced, given the amount of pressure and little details that surround the celebration. After all, a wedding is where everything needs to go as planned to avoid judgment from other family members and disappointment for the bride and groom. The problem, however, is that it takes away so much of what a celebration actually is.
The bride’s dress needs to be positioned in a certain way, the lightning needs to be a certain exposure, the camera person needs to be taking pictures from a certain angle, the groom needs to have a certain expression while looking at the camera, the bride can’t be smiling too much because it gives off a certain image. Micromanaged down to the very last bit, everything is expected to be perfect, and if it isn’t, the couple in question are going to be the hot topic of trending gossip within the families invited and every other family they know.
The more perfect the celebrations are, the less judgment there will be; but the more anxiety there is to make sure everything is perfect. However, focusing on perfection actually takes away from perfection. Sometimes when attending weddings, I wonder if the couple getting married is being celebrated in the correct way, knowing that all of their attention is focused on micromanaging little details of the events. Is their love really being celebrated by the guests (as should be the case for a wedding ceremony), or is it simply a judging contest meant to pick out little details to be the next hot topic in the brown aunty gossip column?
I agree that it can be easy to judge from afar, especially when it comes to something as adorned as a marriage and quite frankly (and thankfully), I’ve had very limited experience planning a marriage myself.
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But that doesn’t necessarily mean I haven’t experienced the bad associations with celebration, anxiety associated with celebration isn’t limited to just big-scale ceremonies. Birthdays, graduations, first days, and first dates are all things to be enjoyed and celebrated, but come with anxiousness. In many cases, it’s the anxiousness that should not be involved in such events.
Last year, I turned 20 years old. As someone who loves to make a big deal out of birthdays, especially my own, I wanted to do something special for a major milestone in my life as I previously did for the “important” birthdays (13 years old, 16 years old, and 18 years old). I noted down all the people I would invite, where I wanted to celebrate, what I would do, and all the other things that go into planning a big birthday bash. And then, the anxiety began to settle in.
Would all my friends get along? What would we do? Where would we go since everyone lived in different areas? What would we eat? Would they all enjoy eating something in particular? If we went to eat dinner, where would we go for dessert after? Would it be too far? Some of us drive and some of us take transit, would it be uncomfortable to go in transit altogether?
I’ve always wanted things to be perfect at my previous birthday celebrations, but when they weren’t, I became upset. As a teenager it was easy to conceal the disappointment. However as a kid, it was an almost traumatizing experience. It’s unanimously agreed within my family that I was an extremely spoiled child having no siblings for the first seven years of my life, so when things simply didn’t go my way, I thought the entire world was turning against me. While the spoiled traits and victim complex did fade away (although my past talking stages and ex-friends would say otherwise), the aim for perfection always seemed to persist. When things didn’t go the way I intended them to, instead of blaming the world, I would blame myself. I’d believe that I had failed myself by not making my celebrations perfect, losing sight of the entire point of a birthday—to celebrate yourself. The anxiety would eat me whole and I don’t think I’ve ever fully enjoyed planning a birthday.
Being able to reflect on that early on before my 20th birthday, I was able to catch myself before becoming too indulged in the planning process. I decided that I would try and keep things the way I thought worked best, and simply not overthink anything—confirming my plans with my friends. It was easier said than done; fighting off the urge to take out my planning notebook was painful and embarrassingly enough, my younger sister had to hide the notebook from me. But for the first time, I wasn’t worried about my birthday being perfect; I just wanted to celebrate with the people I love. I just wanted to enjoy the celebration, no matter how it went.
I think it was one of the best birthday celebrations I had. I wasn’t worried about taking the perfect pictures, eating the food and cake at the right time, and I was so careless that I didn’t even feel the need to touch up my makeup. I was commemorating my life with the people who continue to make my life enjoyable. A birthday celebration is to cherish and celebrate your existence—even if it isn’t “perfect.”
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I could list the many other times I wanted things to be perfect that I completely missed out on the actual celebration aspect, too absorbed by planning and anxiety, but that list would be excessively long. From all the reflection, I’ve learned that enjoying a celebration, even if all goes wrong, is much better than being consumed by perfectionism.
Celebrate your life, celebrate yourself, and all of your milestones—especially the little ones. Life is short, and being caught up in planning every little thing makes you miss out on moments that you should be able to enjoy. Moments that are meant to be yours.
