I need your help.

You remember this whole fiasco with the deranged bride who left the bad review (which references me having an AFFAIR with a MARRIED MAN??!!!!) which her ENTIRE family disagreed with, including her husband? (Yeah, even her husband apparently disagreed with her and was upset with her for doing it and was totally happy and loved the pictures...) The mother in law, who is the person who wanted a photographer and selected and hired me and was the only person allowed to leave a review on the website per their own guidelines, left a positive rebuttle review and I thought I would be able to have the bride's review removed since it broke pretty much every rule they had. For some reason, they won't remove it and the only emails I am getting from the company are form letters that say, Unfortunately, this review does not fit our criteria for removal and will remain on the site. Warm regards! And has a generic signature on it with no specific person to contact and no names. I have contacted them over and over and over agian and am getting no where.

Each member takes a vow when they sign up for an account that they will leave honest reviews of vendors, and just by reading the review we know she lied because the dates don't match up- the most simple example of this is that she said it took 2.5 months to get her pictures back when she had only been married for 7 weeks when she left the review.

The first rule of the site is that you have to have a "business contract" with the vendor in order to leave a review. I never had a contract with her and had never communicated with her in any way prior to her leaving the review. She was not and has never been my client. My client is totally happy and has asked her repeatedly to remove the review and in fact, she told both of us she was going to, but didn't. I did an additional 100 edited images for them- something I didn't have to do, and the mother in law said was totally not necessary because she loved the pictures as-is but I did it anyway to be nice. The bride still never acknowledged it or removed the review or AT LEAST remove the part about Matt. Which she said she would do. It has been 30 days, and nothing.

Project Wedding is the site where she actually left the review (but PW is owned by Wedding Wire, which also owned Wedding Bee, City Weddings, and about 8 other sites, so her review is now displaying on ALL of those sites too) and that site has the following rules too:

We remove posts, biographies, comments, private messages, reviews, and any other content that contains language that is inappropriate or offensive

We don't allow posts, biographies, comments, private messages, reviews, wiki articles, and any other content that personally attack another user.

We remove posts...reviews...and other forms of communication between members that contain language that is inappropriate or offensive, his includes content that contains language or imagery that is:
Hateful, bigoted, or offensive
Defamatory, abusive, or threatening
We don't allow posts, biographies, toasts, reviews, wiki articles, and other forms of communication between members that personally attack other users.

In addition comments that may cause distress, embarrassment, or humiliation will not be tolerated.

All of these excerpts were taken from the Community Guidelines page of PW: http://www.projectwedding.com/info/community_guidelines

In the review, the woman says among many, MANY other hurtful UNTRUE disparaging things, that I was going through a "stupid breakup with a married man." This is the part of the review that sends me into hysterics. Everytime I look at it, or get a communication from the companies, which is frequently, I get REALLY upset. This company is a huge part of my business and it is HUMILIATING knowing that people can read that review and are judging me not knowing what the story it. But I don't WANT them to know what the story is, because it is none of their business and I can't handle the general public knowing what happened to me this summer. I just can't handle it. I can't. I need the review, or at least THAT SENTENCE removed. I am totally wound up and upset right now thinking about people reading it... I need it to go away and I am not making progress on my own and I need help. Can you please help me?

Obviously, the review breaks the rules on these websites. I don't know if they aren't reading my complaints or what, but it OBVIOUSLY breaks their guidelines and should have been removed right away. If you can, I would really appreciate it if you could do whatever you can to get the post removed. Flag her profile as inappropriate, email the company, flag the review, something, ANYTHING you can do, or are comfortable doing I would appreciate. I am at my breaking point with this and am contemplating removing my company profile from all of their websites- which would be a huge blow to my business, which I can't afford, and I don't even know if it's possible to do- all to get this one line removed from this review. What has nothing to do with my business and the entire review is false anyway! I am so upset. ...

Here is a link to the profile of the lady, which shows my review- it's the only review she wrote. You can make an account in about 10 seconds and flag her profile as in appropriate. That is the course of action which requires the least amount of effort.

http://www.weddingwire.com/wedding/UserViewProfile?wid=083daa45f81d7567

I don't know what she did this, but talking to the mother in law and my mom, it seems that she's taking out her unhappiness in being married on me. I don't know why someone would do that, but being really young, and pregnant and newly married to someone she probably doesn't know really well and whom she had called the wedding off the week before the wedding before going through with it... the woman has issues but that doesn't make what she did okay. I think that I am confidant enough to say I had enough issues going on already before this happened. This was a slap in the face on top of it.

This is where she left the review originally, but since she did it under a guest account, they remove all of the buttons that allow you to flag it as inappropriate for some reason?????????? But maybe there is another way to pursue it here.

http://www.projectwedding.com/vendor/show/heizer-photography

I hope some of you will helpl me with this. I need help getting rid of this. I need it to go away. I NEED it to. What she said is so incredibly hateful and will be there FOREVER unless I can get some help in having it removed. I don't want this in my face everytime I try to work on my business...

Afraid

I'm afraid to go to bed because as soon as I get in there I'll be alone with my thoughts and my thoughts upset and scare me. I don't want to think about him or it.

I got a letter from Kaiser. My insurance will be canceled as of January 1st. I have been on a discounted student program type thing for the last 4 years. You start out only paying 20% of the actual cost of your coverage. The next year you pay 40%, then 60%, this year I paid 80%. It's supposed to like... wean you into adulthood or something. I thought I would just be graduated into full coverage or something, but apparently they just terminate you from the program with a letter, buh-bye. The first letter had no explaination and I freaked. I just got another one today and that had one additional sentence of explaination, which said that you can only be on the 80% plan for 1 year and then you can't be in the Steps program anymore, so you will need to find other coverage. And it provided a number to call if you would like to talk to a rep about being covered through Kaiser, or if you suspect Kaiser is dumping you because you have health issues. (Which I found amusing to be included in this letter. lol)

Can you say STRESSED?

Stressed spelled backwards is Desserts. That is the only explaination I have for eating an entire large size bag of mixed dark chocolate and milk chocolate mini reese's over the last 2 days or whatever. 3 days I guess because I bought them on Monday... or was it Sunday? I don't even know when I bought them.

I have a sore throat. How can I get sick when I don't go anywhere or do anything or see anyone?

I don't want to be by myself and I am afraid to leave my desk and go to bed because I am afraid of letting my mind not be busy with other things. Thinking about what happened is getting so upsetting and overwhelming I can't cope with it. And I don't want to. I need to do something else or go some place else or run away. I just want it all to go away. I'm not sleeping well anymore. Did I tell you that already? I'm having nightmares and waking up a lot. I've been forgetting to take my medication a lot. I can't remember if I've taken it and I'm afraid to take it in case I already have. It's so hot in my house and I'm afraid to sleep with the windows open because I don't feel safe. I don't want to turn the air or fan on because I don't feel like I can afford it.

Off to bed.

I wish I didn't.

But I love him more than I have ever loved any one else. And I still feel like he is my partner and lover and sweetheart and anything else you could think to call it... the love of my life.

I don't know how to turn those feelings off. I wish I could, because it hurts me to feel that way towards him, not because of the betrayal, but because he is gone. And I miss him so desperately.

I'm finding myself avoiding going to bed again. I am SO tired. And I don't wnat to go to bed. The second I lay down I am compeltely overwhelemed with anxiety. I feel so panicky. Thinking about everything, my mind is a total swirl and I want to scream and cry and run away. I think about being in the house and I want to scream to make it stop. I think about being scared and I want to cry for him to be there to comfort me. I think about him touching me and then the betrayal and my skin crawls over that thought and I want to vomit and scrub myself all over with sandpaper everywhere he ever touched me. The "safe" places in my mind they tell you to retreat to in those anxiety classes, picture a serene place or a person where you feel protected when you begin to feel overwhelmed or upset... I've always gone to the man in my life as the big comfort and protector in those situations. And when I bring him to my mind- usually involuntarily, I feel sick.

Yet I love him and miss him. I am so mixed up.

I had a photo shoot on Sunday with a client whom knows the brief version of what happened. She works for a personal injury law firm and I gave her a brief synopsis in September when I had a meeting with her before her wedding at her office. Her dad is a retired chief police detective and she spoke to him about everything as well- not telling him who I was. (Thank the Lord for that because I met him at the wedding and I would have been humilated for him to have known all of that about me.)

When I saw her yesterday she was telling me about all of this and aksing me how things were going, and trying to encourage me to go forward, telling me how important it was. Particularly the things her dad said about Matt being a highway patrolman... that it was abslutely dispicable that he was representing such an upstanding organization and behaving in such a way. Apparently her Dad had alot to say about the switching of the name badge thing. He also had a number of things to say about fraud, which I didn't think was applicable since we didn't share property, but my client said he spoke of it for a long time. It may be he was talking about criminal, rather than civil law, but I don't know.

Anyway, when my client was talking about this, and trying to encourage me to do something about what he has done, I said... something, and she replied with, "Well, your life will never be the same again. He has forever changed your life. It is as simple as that. You will never trust people again. You will never have the ability to trust people in the same way you did every again. You won't ever have that ability to just innocently trust someone. He stole that from you and you're not going to be able to get it back. He changed your life. He destroyed that."

And it's true. And of course in all that therapy crap they tell you that you will work through things and make it better and blah blah blah and don't make blanket statements or say things like "always" "never" etc. BUT... She's right, and I know she is. He stole something from me. He stole innocence. So much of that has been given away or taken already at this point, and he took I don't know... probably everything that I had left, everything that I had saved and treasured and protected and given him because he was the one and I implicitly trusted him like no other. I told him all of my secrets. I was assaulted when I was a pre-teen. He knew that. He knew I had problems with depression. He knew all of me. He did all of this anyway.

Something else that makes this all the more serious? He's a cop. Talk about the ultimate violation of trust. If you can't trust a police officer, the ultimate upholder of the law, who can you trust?

Well, no one, of course.

I RAN!

Last night I did something I haven't done in months and months... for a lot of reasons, and most recently, for the obvious reasons I have been talking about on this blog for the last two months. I went to the gym.

I had been thinking about it for a few days. I got dressed to go several times and was too... afraid? (not quite the right word...) to go. Last night I finally went. I got dressed to go in the morning and I didn't make it out the door until after 930pm at night but I did go.

It was hard. It was scary. I was afraid of people looking at me. I was afraid of MEN looking at me. I wore a jacket, three shirts, a sports bra, a bra, pants and a pair of bike shorts underneath. I still felt really exposed.

When I got up to the treadmills I about had a heart attack because out of the 20+ treadmills there were probably 4 or 5 guys up there and they were all equally spread out so I couldn't be more than one machine away from any of them. At that point I wasn't sure I could stay, but I did, and I just set up camp next to a woman, and prayed that the guy two machines over would leave soon.

I watched Law and Order on the tv. I was sweating like crazy in all those clothes but I didn't want to take my sweatshirt off because I didn't want the guy on the machine two over to be able to see my body. Do you see what an issue this is becoming? I was completely aware of how out of control it was getting and at the same time I couldn't control my anxiety enough to just take the darn thing off.

This is the "exciting" thing, if you can call it that. I ran! I have had a knee injury (patello-femural syndrome- runner's knee- basically my knee grinds bone on bone) for the last couple of years and haven't been able to take care of it with PT on my own. I have really missed running, especially now with all of this adrenilne from the anxiety built up in me. Well, yesterday, I RAN!

Guess how fast I ran????

3mph.

LOL

Do you have any idea how excruciating it is to run that slow? What was sad was that I was wiped after "running" at that pace for 5 minutes and had to go back to walking! What sucked more was that my knee still ended up hurting afterwards anyway. :( But the pain during was minimal, which is good... but the pain after indicates that my joints are still grinding so I probably shouldn't do it.

So I did leave my house this week, I did an activity, and I did something physical for the first time since everything happened. Lots of firsts.

On the flip side, I was in WalMart last week and needed to stop and take my blood pressure at the pharmacy area (I have to monitor it because of the medication I am on can cause high blood pressure, so I am supposed to check it every time I see a machine). A man was sitting at the machine, but was getting up to leave. I almost cried to see him sitting there because he had touched it. I had to check my BP because it had been a long time since I checked it since I haven't been leaving the house, but I didn't want my body to touch anything he touched. Without even thinking about it, I pulled a piece of paper out of my purse, wrapped it around my arm, and stacked some products on the machine so my skin wouldn't come into contact with anything he had touched and I could still check my BP. Then I cried.

I know it's not normal, and I dont know why I did it. I didn't even think about it, I just did it. It really upset me- both that I did it, and that I was so disturbed that some man had touched the machine. Intellectually I know it's ridiculous. But the rest of me... ??? I don't even know what to think. I told my therapist, she seemed to understand, she said that it was consistent with the trauma I had, she also said that I might need EDMR therapy because of what happened in the house, which is some sort of eye movement thing which desensitizes you from trauma, and she also offered to refer me back to IOP (the outpatient thing.)

I have to go shoot a wedding today. Can't we just shoot me instead?

Oh, and the cat learned how to slide the window open now too, in addition to pulling the screen out. So, the window I had opened a crack, was slid open 8 inches so he could let himself out to go play outside this morning, where I found him wandering around yowling for me in the grass, covered in mud. Thanks Tootie. YOU ARE AN INSIDE CAT! READ THE MEMO!

My Wedding: Wordless Wednesday

I've been thinking about this for a few days... This was part of what I lost too. Weddings really aren't so important, and I only wanted a total of 15 people there. (Ok, I am using the term "wanted" loosely, more like minimum number required...)


Empty luscious green pasture, mooing cows, the Marin French Cheese Company of Novato playing hostess- a place where I fed ducks and ate happy meals as a preschooler. Blues, yellows, greens, a custom dress made by Melissa Blackburn of Utah, a sweetheart bust, short lace sleeves, bridal buttons and tea to ballerina length with lots of fabric detailing- pleating, gathers, ruffles. Parisienne macarons in little boxes as favors. Ravenburg or the Sloans would shoot it and David Perry would film it. I had already quoted and budgeted everything.

I had a sketch of the full dress front and back, but I guess I hid it from myself on the computer. Too painful to look at....


The most important thing to me above all things was the ceremony. I wanted all of the emphasis on the ceremony. On the words said. Words said to us, about us and by us. I wanted a fiddle player- not a violinist... there is a piece of music played as the theme of the character "Gus Pike" on Avonlea... a show from the late 80's early 90's based on the books by LM Montgomery. (Best known for Anne of Green Gables). I have loved that piece of music all my life. I wanted to walk down the aisle to that and only that. It would have been incredibly meaningful to me, and that's exactly what I wanted the ceremony to be. Meaningful. About us, committing to each other, for forever. I wanted to treasure that moment and not rush through it. I was so looking forward to holding his hands and looking in his eyes and sharing all of those sentiments and making all of those promises. My whole heart was joyful in anicipation of that moment.


About a week ago I cleaned out the account I had for the wedding and put it towards bills. It wasn't very much anyway. It only hurt a little to do it. Seeing it empty... it just makes me feel empty.

The very first inspiration board is the one I concisely compiled with specific ideas that I planned on using. I had nailed down suppliers for just about everything. Matt told me... when he got his job back, or as soon as he shipped off to FLETC for his training to be an ATF agent and got his life back on track, that we would be back on track. That he wanted to spend his life with me, that I was the only one for him, the only one in his life, the only one he wanted to be with, or would be with, and I was his match. That he loved me.

I believed him.

These are the actual pastures in Novato...

Back Soon

Temporarily going private, back soon.

Someone I don't know who wasn't invited accessed this blog, which made me very upset. That said, there may be times in the future where I may click private on and off. I dont want to lock anybody out, so if you can, please leave me your email addresses as a comment or email them to me and I will send you an invite so if I suddenly switch it to private like I did today, you won't be locked out for any period of time. That okay guys?

Also, just an FYI if anyone was wondering, any time you leave a comment on ANY post old or new I will get it. I don't moderate the comments, but I do have them emailed them to me when you post them so I do get them all and read them all. So you can comment on anything new or old and I will absolutely get it.

I was stupid today and looked at Matt related stuff and got upset and I got MAD and swore at the computer for the first time.

I got mad... I called him a bad word. I called him more than one bad word.

Am I gonna get in trouble for that?