What exactly is ‘baggage’? I have it, my husband has it… we ALL have it.  It’s the mental and emotional ‘stuff’ we carry.  It starts when we really start forming memories and we just keep gathering things as we get older.  For some people it may look like a carry-on.  They pack it all in a nice neat little bag and tuck it in an overhead compartment. For others it may look like you’re headed on a year long trip with bags upon bags packed like you just threw everything in something, hoping it gets there. Here’s the thing.  That small carry-on bag may hold the weight of the world in it for one person…. And conversely the bags upon bags packed chaotically may hold a lot of little things that have built up and built up over time and now feel like the weight of the world for somebody else.  My point is, we can’t judge someone by the amount of ‘bags’ they carry. We all go through different things in life. We all have different experiences, challenges…trials. We are all individuals.  I will stress that over and over again.

As you may have noticed in our first posts, Chaz and I come with quite a bit of emotional stuff that we’ve each carried throughout our lives. If you don’t know that, go back and read our first couple of posts…I think they’re interesting…maybe you will too. I decided early on in our relationship that we absolutely needed to address this. I really…really liked Chaz when we met, and I needed him to know that his heart and his mind and everything that came with him were safe with me. I needed the same reassurance from him. At the very beginning of our relationship, we both knew there was something special between us. We had these invisible strings pulling us together. It is hard to describe, and nothing I had ever experienced in my life before that. But we had to address all the things that hurt us, all the emotional crap that we had both been carrying and had been affecting us individually.  He was going through a divorce; I had just months before buried the man I had been married to for 18 and known for 19 years. How in the world do you start to unpack it all when it’s…a lot? A few years ago, I described it like this. “One day we sat down threw everything on a table, sorted through it, talked about it, cried, and then gathered it all up and threw it off a mountainside.”

Was it that easy? Hahahaha… (straight face) …no. We started with hard conversations. Did we like talking about each other’s past relationships? I can’t say it’s in my top ten things I loved to talk about, I’m positive it’s not on my husband’s either, but we did it, because we needed to. We talked about our childhoods. We talked about abuse in our respective relationships. We talked about self-esteem, what we hate about ourselves, if there were regrets from our pasts, traumatic experiences that changed our lives, addiction. There were times Chaz would walk into a room and I would smile and he would give me what he thought was a convincing smile back, and I would look at him and say, “Don’t fake smile me.” For awhile it always stunned him that I would even notice if something was off. It took a while for him to realize that in some ways I saw him better than he could see himself. He would say, “What do you mean?” And I would say, “That’s not your real smile…what’s going on?” And a conversation would start.  It was not easy for each of us to learn about all the hard things that happened in our lives, it was painful and heartbreaking. And it was absolutely necessary.  Communication is a keystone in our relationship.  We have to talk to each other, and I love knowing we can talk about everything together. I talked to Chaz more in the first six months of knowing him than I talked to the man I was first married to in the 19 years I knew him.  That’s not an exaggeration and it’s hard to even admit out loud. 

Did we actually throw that baggage off of a mountainside? Figuratively… for the most part… yes, we did. All that really means, is that we addressed what we needed to and then left it all in the past where it belongs, where we no longer live or belong. See the thing is we had to learn from all of the stuff that we’ve been through.  Because of that, we have been able to grow as individuals and as a couple. We are not the same people we were when we were kids, or teenagers or 20-somethings, we aren’t even the same people we were 7 years ago when we met, when I was 44 and he was 50.  We’ve had many, many conversations since then. We know each other better and continue to learn and grow every day. That’s part of life… learning from the past, growing, and living in the present. There is still some baggage, I think there always will be, but the weight is much lighter, because we carry it together. The weight is lighter because we unpack, acknowledge, and work through it… together.