You’ve been carrying around that emotional baggage for far too long and it seems like time to get rid of it. But somehow, it feels like it wouldn’t be right to completely get rid of it. Is that wrong?
Actually, no. It’s not wrong. The way we’ve been taught to think about emotional baggage has been all wrong.
Is getting rid of emotional baggage good for you?
You’d think that the most healthy thing to do is take your emotional baggage and do something really dramatic to get rid of it. Like burning it or throwing it in a river or something. But at the moment, you can’t and you know that you can’t because that emotional baggage has become so much a part of you that you can’t just cut it off like a toenail. That emotional baggage is much more than a toenail, it’s more like a toe, or a foot, or maybe even a hand. And in so many cases, it’s even more than that, it’s deep inside your heart. It’s a part of you.
Does that mean you’re doomed?
No way.
The key is to separate the wheat from the chaff – or in this case, the baggage from the trash.
Baggage isn’t all bad.
It’s just the dirty, grimy, nasty pieces of trash that you’re still harboring that are bad. The rest is good. The rest is baggage you can and should keep. It’s not called baggage for nothing. Just like you wouldn’t throw away all of your baggage while you’re on a trip, there’s no reason to get rid of all of your emotional baggage. Baggage is your friend, trash isn’t.
Which is which?
How to separate the baggage from the trash
Until now we’ve been discussing emotional baggage comparing it to actual baggage, or luggage. And at this point in the analogy, we’ve come to a difficult spot, because at this point, it’s time to look at what’s inside. When traveling, that’s not too difficult to do. You open the bag and search around. Take stock.
Look at what you have. Consider what you need and what you can get rid of and what you need more of…In the process you’ll also notice that you’ve been carrying around an apple since you left the house 5 days ago and it’s starting to smell a little funny. And what’s that…a banana.
Eww.
Time to take out the trash and clean off anything it touched. Now, if you were fortunate enough to compartmentalize the baggage in the first place, hopefully, the rotten fruit didn’t get all over the rest of the baggage. If you did, you might need to make some difficult decisions about the dirty clothes and whatnot. You can probably salvage a lot of it with a good wash. But some of it might not be worth salvaging. Like those old socks that are getting holes in them…those you might want to throw away.
Looking through what you have can be difficult, painful, even smelly. It’s the time to confront that not everything about your belongings, emotional and otherwise, are perfect. Your soul, on the other hand, is. perfect.
The trick is to realize that the smelly baggage isn’t essentially you — it’s just what you carry around with you while you’re on this amazing trip called life. Your baggage isn’t your identity. It’s not your self. And once the trip’s over, there are only certain pieces of baggage you can keep — like the good deeds you deeded and the self improvement you accomplished and the real relationships you developed.
Tzvi Freeman makes an amazing point about the nature of emotional baggage. If you don’t want it, stop calling it baggage – its just trash to dispose of.