I believe everyone has emotional baggage. Some more than others. However, what makes us special as humans are how well we can handle our baggage and not let it influence our lives or worse of all, the lives of others.
Once a month, I go through an intense feeling of emotional instability. You could blame it on the hormones but within that period all my insecurities and fears start closing in and my inadequacies become too obvious for me.
Within that period, I struggle with controlling my finance, my health and my relationship with others. I feel an intense amount of pain that I can't explain to anyone because I know the feeling subsides after a while.
Emotional baggage from past experiences haunts me within those few days and I'm human so depression doesn't ever sit so far away whenever these feelings set in.
It's easy to get roped into feelings of hurt from our past, especially those hurts that we know full well that we did not deserve like a heartbreak from a cheating spouse whom we loved so much or a parent who left you as a child to suffer in the hands of strangers.
I found myself sinking into a pit of self-hate and disgust when I realised that my relationship of over 4 years was nothing but a joke to my partner. I hated men who liked me and had a growing fear of starting a real relationship for almost 4 years.
The hurt made me doubt things about myself and people so much that it began to strongly affect my relationship with a lot of people, especially men.
I had a hard time accepting that I had emotional baggage. I just found myself living with so much hate that I didn't know how to let go. A guy would talk to me and I would just hate him without provocation.
I learned to overcome my emotional baggage by first accepting that I was in pain. That made me cry so much. I cried because I had to accept that I didn't deserve to be hurt that badly but it happened regardless and I had to live with the memories of all I went through in those 4 years.
The next thing I had to do was retrace my steps and understand the person I used to be before that relationship: what made me special and how I could improve based on what I had learnt within that relationship.
I decided to take my baggage and learn from it. I outlined the good, bad and horrible lessons that that experience could teach me and I decided to take the good and run with them.
I can't deny that it's difficult because it is. Sometimes, I still find myself doubting people but I try to focus on the good and if things go south, I try to understand where I went wrong and how I could make things better in my next attempt.
As long as you're a living human, you will continue to gather emotional baggage. It's not the best pep talk but you will get hurt often and while it might make sense to add each hurt to that baggage of emotions, after a while, you need to learn how to let go of hurt as quickly as it comes.
Life is meant to be fun. Imagine how sad you would feel for a child at a playground carrying a heavy backpack that weighs them down and stops them from having fun.
Put down that baggage and enjoy life.
