I'd be lying if I said I didn't have any baggage.
You'd be lying if you said you didn't have any baggage.
That's right...I called you out. Yeah, I said it.
Baggage in relationships are an interesting concept, one that I have pondered as who I am and the paths that I take in my personal development grow and become easier for me to navigate. Cue a Mary J. song. (You know that there's a Mary song for everything.) As my new found friendship/relationship/big ass ? mark grows into something that has the potential to be awesome, I find myself looking at both his baggage and, well, my own.
Let me backtrack for a second.
A good friend of mine, when talking me down from my proverbial panicked 'ledge', pointed out: "He's like an onion, gotta slowly peel the layers..." And to me, that is an ideal way to look at a relationship as it grows: each person has layers of their persona that you uncover as you get to know them. Like Chris Rock said in "Bigger and Blacker", "You can’t get nobody looking like you look, acting like you act, sounding like you sound. When you meet somebody for the first time, you’re not meeting them. You’re meeting their representative!" (What's that? You've never SEEN Bigger and Blacker? You're slacking. Check it out.) You do meet their representative the first time around. And as you get to know them better, you let a layer fall off. You shed some of that protective skin to reveal the tender skin underneath. And within the shedding of those layers, hopefully, is the revealing and shedding of baggage.
So I have baggage. Dealing with the father of my child definitely left a few scars that took me a few years to get by. (And, for the record, I went through a Caribbean man phase. I don't subscribe to that theory now.) But anyway, dealing with him taught me so much about who I was that if I ever talk to him on a semi-friendship level again, I owe him a debt of gratitude. He truly made me who I am: much more confident from having to rebuild my self-esteem, more poised from dealing with the BS, more focused from making up for lost time, etc., etc.It's true. I have baggage. And I deal with it. I don't let it deal with me.
So it's always an interesting concept when I meet a guy who also has baggage. Who steps on eggshells around certain topics because he doesn't want the 'crazy black woman' to rear their ugly head. Who is weary of the independent black woman because they don't feel like dealing with all their crazy standards. I mean, he deals with it...he works on his baggage as I work on mine...but for those of us women who think that men don't have issues like that, think again. They do and they have and they deal with it the same way we do: one day at a time.
What do you think? Is there baggage on both sides? How do you deal with your baggage?
1 comments:
So being technologically challenged, it took me a week to figure out how to post a comment. Disclosing that may prevent others from taking any stock in my comment... buffoonery is seldom honored or entertained...
Okay, I do believe that anyone who has been in any type of relationship and walked away with a lesson has baggage. Baggage comes in many forms. If you were with someone that catered to you to the point of becoming an enabler, you may have baggage. You may be so unrealistic and unfair in your expectations of others that you will stand in the way of any future relationships. Baggage isn't always in the form of hurt and pain. I think men have baggage as do women. I know I have baggage for sure. Whats important is being aware of it, working on it and trying not drop the load instead of expecting your every relationship in the future to be strong enough to bear the burden of carrying all the crap that comes along with you. One must ask themselves when they are going to check in their baggage altogether. After all, its not valuable enough to claim. Great post. Made me think of my own nonsense!
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