Value your lessons & value yourself

 Value your lessons & value yourself

When a child is born ideally this child is precious. The baby is innocent, unique, pure, honest, dependent a complete blank slate. Tabula Rasa (blank slate) it is a gift & a curse. Our chapters are dependent on the caregivers, be it healthy or unhealthy parents, or parental figures. The baggage we carry was packed by the past, our parents fill our bags with love, acceptance, honesty, coping skills or stones.  

If your bags are filled with all the spoils of being cherished, your load is light, your baggage is a delightful carry on bag, easy to traverse life with, always having it available to assist you, hurdles are easier with this load & victories are momentous. 

   When your baggage is fill with judgement, anger, pain, distance & uncertainty, your baggage is unmanageable. This baggage is heavy, the wheels don’t roll so we are forced to carry these heavy bags. The locks will not remain fastened allowing our stuff to tumble out, for all the world to see.  Like dropping your purse in a crowed mall, only to have tampons and an obscene amount of candy spill in a delightful 10ft radius as you hope the floor would just open up and swallow you whole. 

Daily tasks become daunting, too much to handle, so we try and abandon our baggage, sure we will be fine without it. Unaware we need to unpack this baggage, toss the broken bags that have tethered you to a painful past. Only then can we lose the damaged bags & and pack new bags ones that can serve our lives in a positive way.                                                                                                   

   Everyone carries baggage, we tend to think about carrying baggage as all bad, but it is not. Baggage is carried by one and all, the weight of the bag are the difference. With that said, evaluating our baggage is something we all need to consider, if your bags are lite and easy to access consider being a little more patient with those that continue to struggle. We are struggling to unpack, prioritized, ignore, all while we are acting like we have all of our sh*t together, desperate to fit in, be accepted & peace. 

     I can only tell my story, my experience my dysfunctional defunct baggage, that I have been lugging around for five plus decades. Masters degree in Psychology in hand, yet still I struggle with what to do with my own truths. 

     In no way do I think that my parents choose to pack my baggage the way they did, after 80 years they never did manage to unpack their own heavy & troubled bags. This is their truths not mine. They did what they could with what they knew. 

     From my first breath I was daunted with a full set of mismatched ragamuffin bags, heavy and drab, yet these were my bags. It would take decades before I would be able to connect the dots between the baggage I carried, and the reasons they were so heavy to carry. My beginning is not my responsibility, it is merely part of my rocky foundation.  Each heavy load builds upon the next like a brick wall made out of jagged pieces of glass. Each jagged glass brick piled one upon the other, on a bed of unsteady sand peppered with quicksand. 

        Daily life was uncertain, explosive, painful, sad, lonely and never ending. The chaos of life as the eldest child of duel defiant, denial ladened dysfunctional parents, is unsettling disruptive and depressing. I was born a naturally defiant soul, a strong Leo that needs only themselves to “wing it” thru life. My survival is solely dependent on my resilient soul. Nearly every single day of my life I wake up with a hopeful mindset, this is the gift & curse of resilience. No matter how hard things were, I always believed that something better was right around the corner, even if for 100 days straight nothing better happened, my heart always kept a flame of hope flickering in the deluge of life. I would always look back wondering how I made it through, my answer was always the same, everything happens for a reason. Pressing-on became my super power, and it allowed me to flee and flourish in baby steps. Each baby step mattered, some forward many back, yet each day I open my eyes filled with hope. More times than not my hope was dashed but never extinguished. 

    Why this deep dive today? That is the thing, unloading baggage lasts a lifetime, it would seem. I am confident that if anyone just dumped all of their baggage on the floor and tried to deal with it at once, mental implosion would be the result. My experience is that no matter how many times we unpack our bags and inventorying our contents, there is always a little something in the corner of a pocket that spills out all over a regular day. We are stunned when it happens, as if the world can see our emotional dump in the middle of Targets decor aisle. I look around to see if anyone is looking, only to realize that this is just my baggage, I carry it, I see it. All is well in the Target, no one is on to me, I complete my needless stroll throughout the aisle looking at everything and nothing all at the same time. Time to reorganize my baggage, discard what I can and pack my useful carry on, filled with my lessons learned. 

    How did I get here, now? What triggered this emotional sh*t storm?

Value, this is what go me here today, there are volumes of events responsible for the ebb & flow of my value, how much value I assign myself based on my experience. Today as I ran around doing my errands I picked up my Rx’s, I feel bad about having to spend so much money on my medication. $85 receipt in hand I pull into a spot to verify the costs sure that it had to be wrong. As I scan the bottles and receipt looking for validation a sigh of relief pops into my head the medication is for 3 month. Suddenly, I reconcile that I am worth $28.33 a month and try to slam that bag closed, unaware it didn’t fasten, as I went on with my day blissfully ignorant. That moment in Target and a dozen more, will creep in and plant doubt & wonder in my worth file. Throughout the day this baggage finds a nanosecond of silence sprattcically, planting seeds of doubt, fear, anger & frustration. So I can try to drowned out the noise or try to figure it out. It is daunting but, perhaps today is the day to unpack this particular bag. 

    

     As I dig, a flurry of memories, emotions & fear flood my thoughts, each one takes me by surprise and forces me to choose denial or acceptance. Denial equates to superficial peace while a painful deep dive is harder but can eventually lead to true peace. As I worked through my story it was not hard to identify, they are right there on top, how did not see them sooner? There will be time for beating myself up later, kidding (kinda).  So here I am with my baggage wide open and I can clearly see so many instances for this feeling of not worthy, they date back as far as I can remember. My mother reminding me of how much more my “Big Girl” clothing costs, my “special diet food” (she forced one me). My turned out hips & the 7 years of orthodontics, the guilt each time my mother reminded me of how much I COST to maintain. These are a few that I can identify and work with. These were packed in my baggage for me throughout my childhood, by me subconsciously however, my parents added the weight to this bag, time and time again. I choose to believe that my parents did the best that they could, understanding their judgement was clouded with alcohol, their choice for ignoring their own baggage.

So now what to do with these truths? 

     Hard to say, hopefully I can keep moving forward, working thru it, healing my soul, and perhaps discarding the old and packing a lesson of value to my new lite useful carryon. I am running out of time, to keep playing he denial card, is just self destructive. I have spent a few decades emotionally healing, growing & learning. The mistake I have continually made is a thinking with each emotional breakthrough was made, I was done. I thought facing it, saying it, & writing it meant that I eliminated it. 5 decades on the planet & a Grad degree in Psychology 

& I here I sit in a psych 101 lesson, hoping to pass. 

   I have not published a blog in so long, nor have I written in such depth for what seems like ages, my old fear of exposing my truth is looming over my shoulder. I remember my first blog post was one of the most frighting moments of my adulthood. So I did the mature thing and posted and ran. I went to bed and waited till morning to see if anyone even read it, my intent was to delete it and act as if it never happened. However, when I grabbed my coffee and opened my laptop fearful of rejection, and waiting for bully to pounce, I was delighted to see that in the 6 short hours since I posted more than 100ppl had read it. Moreover, I had positive feedback, both publicly and privately. My words had touched others, my story was seen, others started to share their stories with me. It was mind blowing, I continued to write for a few years and delved deep into my own soul. I learned and shared stories I had never uttered a word to a soul. As I peeled back the layers of my life I felt better, I felt like I also helped others too, most importantly I felt validated. 

    

   Evolving involves eliminating! This is a powerful sentence, it was one I needed to learn today. Eliminating un-useful baggage is a must. Learning to pack the right bag, the LITE bag with what I need to learn. 

  We all carry baggage, it is important to always remember that you never know how heavy their baggage is, be patient with each other, & with yourself…  

Cheers to Kindness…