This spring and summer mark the beginning of a new season for a lot of my friends and for my dear dear sister. It is the season for weddings and I, for one, am STOKED.

I’m so excited to celebrate this milestone for my incredible sister, my beautiful bestie from high school, and the world’s best co-worker. They found their forever life partner and bestie for life and with these particular peeps, I got to watch the whole story unfold before my very eyes. It’s honestly such a privilege to watch my friends fall in love.

I’m also blown away by the fact that they all asked me to be in their weddings! I have a growing collection of bridesmaid dresses and to me it feels like a testament to the growing collection of deep friendships in my life. Though my closet could seem like I’m starting my own version of the 27 Dresses movie set, it’s just a joy to champion these women and their future marriages and families. They have invited me into their stories and given me a VIP invite into their hearts during the rollercoaster of wedding planning and apartment hunting, and I feel like I won the friendship lottery.

Amid my joy and excitement (as well as slight exhaustion from so many momentous occasions), I get many questions and comments pointed towards me:

“Why is your little sister getting married before you”

“Always a bridesmaid never a bride…”

“When are you going to get married?”

“So.. what’s going on in your life?”

And here’s the thing,

I’ve been through wedding seasons before where I walked through them in comparison, competition and jealousy. I went to friends’ weddings with the question pounding in my heart and head: “Why them? Why not me? What do they have that I don’t?” or worse, the statement: “I deserve to be married and they don’t.”

Ew. Just thinking about it I feel a kinds of ugly. It was not a cute season for me and all that comparison and angst robbed me of the joy of celebration. It also robbed me of the beauty of the season I was living. I was so busy counting all the things I didn’t have that what I had became meaningless, which is probably the most unfortunate part of it all. I missed the beauty of my life because I refused to see the beauty in others’.

It’s like when you can’t enjoy the winter because all you can think about is how cold it is, and then summer comes and all you can think about is how hot it is. I had a very literal moment like that one summer in the humid, hot, North Carolina woods. I was walking to get a meal while at the 18 inch journey and I was not having the heat, and as I crossed paths with one of the interns at the school I said, “Man, it’s really hot today.” And this man, looked me dead in the eyes and said, “Yeah, it is hot. I like to enjoy the heat because before you know it it’s going to be winter. These days won’t be around forever so I like to really appreciate them because summer is just a season.”

Summer is just a season. mind. blown.

t seems so obvious. Of course it’s just a season, but it made me stop and think about all the things I was consumed with complaining about and hating when they were happening: too much homework in college, being sore from dance class, waking up early to get to class, having so much to do that I don’t get to sleep in. All of those things were actually part of a really sweet season of my life. That conversation with that intern made me realize: I don’t want to miss the sweetness of seasons anymore.

The days are short, things that seem to drag on today feel as temporary as the morning mist tomorrow. The sweetness of each day is a cotton-candy-sweetness, it’s there for a mere moment before melting away to a memory. I want to enjoy the cotton-candy-bites of my life. I don’t want to spend them wishing I had a different flavor or someone else’s cotton candy. So that’s how I’m coming to the wedding season: It’s the cotton candy flavor of celebration and joy over the love and triumph in someone else’s life, and it’s a unique kind of sweetness that I wouldn’t trade for the world. And these ones, these sweet, sweet friends are so dear to me that I wouldn’t want to miss a moment of sharing in their joy! So if you ladies are reading this, thank you for extending to me the honor of laughing and crying with you! And if you’re here going through any kind of season I give you this: enjoy the cotton-candy-sweetness if you can. Leave comparison behind and open your eyes to the beauty of summer or winter or fall — wherever you are, there is definitely sweetness there.