As I get older, with every passing age, I find new people who come in and out of my life. At the measly age of 21, I have encountered every type of person from friendships to relationships, but what I most constantly find myself involved with is people who have baggage and here’s the thing about baggage - is that everyone has it. You might think your life is smooth, but there is something in everyone’s life that they carry.
When I was 18, I was in an AP Literature class with the most phenomenal teacher. She loved the art of literature and more importantly she loved that art of poetry, so what she had asked the class to do is write a poem based off the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. With this poem, each and every student had wrote all the things they carried throughout their life and if they wanted, they were able to present those things to the class. When I got the courage to read my poem aloud, there were so many things that I carried in my heart and life that no one knew about. With hesitation, I was nervous and scared to share these things, but in the end I was glad I did. When we put the things we carry out in the open we never know who we might impact. After this day, I found myself more able to help the people around me because I was aware of the things that I carried.
After this moment of my senior year in High School, I noticed more and more people came in to my life that had some type of baggage and every one of them had told me that there was something about me that they found comforting. The words comforting was never something I described myself as, but what I had found the most interesting was that these people were the easiest to love and the hardest to let go of. Time and time again, I would find myself loving these people who go through the hardest things, things that I could never even imagine going through, but there is something about that strength that these people have that is so admirable and so easy to love.
Every time I meet a person with this type of baggage, I always hear the same things “that’s so hard to get in to” or “It’s going to be difficult”, but isn’t love the most simple, but difficult emotion we will ever have to encounter? We have to take risks in love because everyone deserves it and to me, if these people are so freely comfortable with letting you in when they have gone through a lot then you have to be willing to take the risk and let them in too. People with baggage have the type of strength in love that most people don’t or are afraid of showing.
Baggage is a simple term we use to avoid the fact that we are all going through something or have gone through something, but what we avoid the most is using that heartache and using our struggles to find the most loving and deserving people. Everyone is going through something and it takes strength, grace, and patience to allow those people into our hearts and to help us because everything in life never comes easy and with the help of love things just may be more simple than we think.
