July 22, 2020
5 Types of Baggage You Need to Drop
Do you ever go on vacation and somehow find it harder to fit everything into your bags than when you left your house? Yeah sure, you picked up a cute souvenir but is it really going to have a space/purpose in your house or will it stay collecting dust in some random corner? Life is kind of the same. We tend to pick up baggage as we go through life, and we bring back it with us camouflaged as “souvenirs”. If you don’t sort through and get rid of it in a timely manner, you end up with junk you drag around house to house for no reason other than the fact it’s been in your closet for years, and you have no intention of dealing with it. Yes, it’s a daunting task, and you’d much rather put it off. BUT, the problem with that is, the longer you put it off, the MORE you will have to sort through some time or another because of how it’s affecting you and others around you. It’s inevitable.
1. Your Past
The first type of emotional baggage we could benefit from letting go is the past. There’s value in remembering what has happened so you can learn from it, but dragging it around with you serves absolutely no purpose. Whether you want to admit it or not, the past is over, and you can’t go back. Acknowledging this is the best way to lighten up your emotional load.
2. Negativity
For a lot of people, negativity feels like safety. By only imagining what could go wrong/focusing only on what IS wrong could be used as a self defense mechanism to coping with bad things in life. What they don’t see is having a negative aspect at all times is the equivalent of wearing a bag of rocks while trying to climb up a hill— all it does it makes the journey more difficult than it needs to.
3. Guilt
Let go of the guilt. Sometimes this relates back to the past, but it’s not the same. People can let go of the past yet still hold on to the guilt it brought because they feel they deserve to carry it with them. Guilt is a waste of time, and honestly, life is short. You have to make the most with the time given. If you know me, you know I’m constantly talking about productivity and doing more with less time. Guilt is counter productive to everything I teach.
4. Expectations
Letting go of expectations is key. What we expect of ourselves and of others creates unnecessary stress and issues in our minds, and we don’t realize how much of it weighs us down. They may seem like good things that help keep you in line, but in reality, they’re HEAVY and use energy to keep you weighed down than for actually accomplishing set goals.
5. Other’s mistakes
This one sounds odd to a lot. “Why would I care about what others did?” Well, you do. And you’re probably carrying it without realizing it. Whether it’s parents, siblings, friends, or coworkers, many of us need to drop the baggage we carry around of what others have done. It may be because we feel partial responsible or because we’ve been deeply hurt by it. Just as our own pasts, we cannot undo someone else’s actions. As a grown up, it’s your responsibility for your own emotional well-being. You have complete power and total control over one person: you. Sometime you just need to drop your baggage, and learn to repack.
by Nilly Naseer-Farooqui, originally written on @wordsbehindasmile