Recently I took a trip and I lost my baggage. It wasn’t the airline’s fault like it usually is. I voluntarily lost it. I let it go. Something inside of me realized that I just didn’t need my baggage anymore so I left them behind.
It’s really frustrating losing my baggage because I have lived with it for so long. To be honest I don’t really know how to live without it. It’s kept me safe and warm, providing me with a nice coat of judgment and condemnation whenever someone hurt me. My favorite outfit was expectation. That one was so fashionable it wasn’t even funny. It kept people at bay which allowed me to avoid relationships and intimacy.
I keenly remember my baggage in college. I can remember meeting her and feeling so overwhelmed with love and joy and fear and insecurity. At first we couldn’t see each other’s baggage because we chose to look past it. The bliss of the moment, the hope of possibility, and the intense desire to connect allowed us to transcend our baggage. But over time, it seems like our closets got crowded. I so remember that time I put on the shirt of jealousy when I saw her talking to that guy. It made me feel powerful and pathetic all at the same time. And over time, I stopped overlooking my baggage so she stopped overlooking mine. It was mutual disgust as we chose to end it in our plaid coats of hopelessness. But hey, logic and statistics say its possible again so why not try. Instead of learning to get over my baggage and offer grace to hers it was just easier to find someone who didn’t have baggage…or looked like they had baggage…or at least hoped didn’t have more baggage than me.
The problem is that without my baggage I feel naked. I don’t have something to wear when it’s cold. I actually have to face reality, and own up to my own bullshit. And it stinks. I can’t hide behind that outfit with the really killer label called “self-absorption”, or its twin “blindness”. You see I had come to realize that as comfortable and safe these outfits had become, the killer labels had kept me from seeing myself. My baggage was literally ironically killing me.
So I chose to lose my baggage…voluntarily. I know the temptation will come. And I’m sure the moment something blows up in my face I’m sure I’ll get a call from the airlines with a notice that they’ve found my bags. They were lost somewhere between dignity and despair. And if I’m honest with myself, I’ll just tell the airlines to keep them. Because I don’t need or want my baggage anymore.
