As we journey through life, bearing killer heels, juggling careers and relationships, we are advised to dance like no one is watching, love like you have never been hurt, sing like there is nobody listening and live like its heaven on earth (Thanks William W. Purkey, Purkey by name, perky by nature it seems!). All of this sounds totally wonderful and like most of us, it’s a life I aspire to lead. To wake up and attack each day with positivity, happiness, light, laughter and glamour. To dance in 5 inch killer heels to our favourite songs, throwing our best Beyonce moves without fearing we may be disowned by our nearest and dearest. To sing loudly outside the safe confines of our car and have no fear of smashing mirrors (move over Adele!) and it would be wonderful to be blind to the horrors of the world we live in and live like we are in heaven ,if you even believe in such a place. Mine would be a fat free, calorie free Ben and Jerry’s kinda heaven, maybe with Jamie Oliver, Dermott O’Leary and Simon Hirst, but I digress! But as for loving like you have never been hurt?! Maybe that is the hardest piece of advice to live by. Can we honestly put our emotional baggage down, forget we ever had it and be free? Ask any girl who has been lied to, made to feel insignificant and betrayed by the person she once loved and see what she says. Is it because our hands are full of emotional baggage that we struggle to dance and sing freely? How often are we holding on to these overstuffed bags of memories of what was? Are we clutching these bags so tightly, like a comfort blanket of warm, fuzzy but distant memories, rather than looking inside those bags and seeing things what those memories actually are now. Maybe we don’t because it’s too painful, maybe it’s because we don’t want to face what we know we must and maybe it’s just too hard to sometimes say good bye when all we want to have back what we have lost. When you have poured all your hopes, dreams and trust into that one person who you believed was worth it and they let you down, all that hurt and rejection is neatly piled up in to an already over flowing emotional bag. And as we get a new hair cut, shrink a dress size in the post diet break up, find a new hobby, plan a girly holiday and totter off into a happier sunset, complete in AllSaints finest, how many of us are actually aware we are carrying all that extra baggage? Maybe we just silently drag it along, blissfully unconscious that it quietly holds us back from fully loving ourselves or anyone else.
But what stops us from going to bin, tipping up Mulberry’s Alexa and just moving on? What are we so frightening of loosing when we have often already lost so much? At a point in our lives when we feel all we have is the memories we mourn are these bags full of emotions helping or hindering us? If there was an excessive emotional baggage fee would we be happy to pay? Or would it make us sit up, take notice, action a swift bag clearance and move on to pastures new free, light and happy? What if we waste too much time in the past, peering into over flowing bags instead of putting it down, letting the millions of little pieces fall on the floor before we start to pick them up and build them, and our future dreams, sky ward....?
So maybe it’s time to be brave, to inch on the lipstick, slip on the killer heels and face what’s inside our emotional handbags. Some times its time to clear out the emotional junk mail loitering in the bottom of our emotional handbags, to bin the scrappy receipts of memories and throw away the broken old lipstick of dreams. Maybe it’s time to make room in our bags, life’s and hearts for a new start, a new lipstick and new dreams. As I begin the work on my new dreams, I’m starting by refilling my emotional bag with a new lipstick, thank you Bobbi Brown in Hollywood Red............
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