How many of you have been hurt? How many of you have felt pain? How many of you have lost someone you love to death, disease or to the world? How many of you have faced rejection or felt you are not good enough?
We have all faced one or all of the above in a period of our lives. We all carry emotional baggage. It is a sack that we carry around all the time packed with our experiences throughout the years. It is a sack filled with our disappointments, trauma, fear and everything wrong that we faced in our lives.
When a human is born, the emotional mind and body are completely healthy. Our experiences in life change that. As humans, we try to protect our emotional wounds and create barriers so we don’t feel the same pain again. However, what we usually do is close ourselves in a bubble. This bubble is made of fear from the outside world.
- Illustration by Fatma AlHashemi (@F_Fotography)
We create different types of fear. Fear of not getting the reward becomes the fear of rejection. Fear of not being good enough in the minds of our friends and family. Fear makes us try to change and create a false image for ourselves. Then we try to project that image according to what they want us to be, just to be accepted, just to have the reward.
We learn to pretend and be in denial of who we really are. To be what we are not, and to practice to be someone else, just to be good enough. We practice and practice until we master how to be what we are not. Soon we forget who we really are, and we start to live our images. We create not just one image but several different images according to the different groups of people we associate with. We create an image at home, an image at school, and when we grow up we create even more images.
When a person gets married, they also bring an immense amount of emotional baggage with them. This includes the idealized expectations and also many inherited cultural and family patterns. Unless the person is aware of the emotional baggage that they are bringing in the marriage, it will interfere with them having a content life and they won’t be able to address it.
Humans pretend to be something very important, but at the same time we believe we are nothing. We work so hard to be someone in that society. Dream, to be recognized and approved by others. We try so hard to be important, to be a winner, to be powerful, to be rich, to be famous, to express our personal dreams, and to impose our dreams onto other people around us.
What we seem to forget is to learn to appreciate our mind, body and soul. Empty your mind and fill your core, learn to love yourself. In order to do that, we need to embrace our fears, learn from our previous mistakes and take chances in life. Move forward towards your goals, be positive and never look back regretfully at your emotional baggage as this contributed in shaping you, making you the stronger person you are today. Move towards a brighter future, a future filled with the company of friends and family that will support your every step.
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