“Leave what’s heavy, what’s heavy behind.”

– Heavy by Birdtalker

As a little girl, I loved everything about moving. The excitement of finding a new place. New rooms to explore and stories to discover. A new yard. New neighbors. But the one thing about moving I always hated was packing. As a little six-year-old, I didn’t even have to do that much of my own packing. But what I did have to do was sit in my room with my mom for hours as we went through all of my things. Slowly trying to weed out all of the “junk,” as my mom called it. Except that I didn’t think it was junk; to me, it was all treasure.

The older I’ve gotten the more I’ve come to see my mother’s point of view. All my childhood treasures slowly became clutter in my room, and soon, trash waiting to be thrown out. 

But my life is still full of junk. Not the physical kind anymore. I clean out my room periodically and no longer have a hard time throwing out things I don’t need. Instead, my “big girl” junk comes in the form of social media, work, extracurriculars, past experiences, and memories.

I replaced my trinkets with emotional baggage.

We all have it, like massive invisible boulders chained to our backs. Chained to us so tight that every breath is a fight for life. A fight to live to see another day.

And sometimes, the boulders begin to whisper to you.

“There’s no use fighting.”

“You’ll never make it.”

“You might as well give up now.”

And so often we listen to the voices. We let all the minutiae in our lives take over and control us like puppets dangling from strings. A string for regret, a string for social media, a string for bad experiences, things we couldn’t even control. Wouldn’t you love to be strong enough to pull out a pair of scissors and cut them all? One string at a time until you’re free. Except that, we don’t seem to want to be free. We’ve grown to worship our captors and to hide our mistakes so far into the darkness we forget they exist.

But it won’t stay hidden. One day, light will chase the shadows away. And we’ll be forced to chose between our cages and leaving what’s heavy behind.

“Leave what’s heavy, what’s heavy behind.”

– Heavy by Birdtalker