Be stingy with where you place your emotional energy.
Many of us go through life with more emotional baggage than we can carry along. The sort of baggage that causes us to wake up exhausted every single day. The kind of baggage that causes consistent brain fog, anxiety, and stress even when we are “relaxing.” Many of us were given heavy bags as children, long before we we able to consent. But a lot of us, rather than unpacking those bags as we grew into adulthood, picked up still more bags during our lives. We picked up the bags of other people’s drama, other people’s fears, other people’s thoughts and opinions of us, and resistance to our own truth. The culture that we live in would have many of us believe that we are not “good” until we have bled ourselves dry on the altar of self-martyrdom. But the reality is, no one exists for the consumption of others.
You can give to your family and community without losing yourself. You can and should hold back your very best for you, because you are and will always will be your most worthy case, your most pressing concern. So many of us spend so much time fixating on the issues of the people around us, our communities, and even the world at large that we completely lose sight of what we are and even who we are outside of being an emotional baggage handler. Many of us then go on to call the world a bleak, desolate place, when all of that emotional energy which we’ve given out isn’t reciprocated in kind. It is imperative to growing in self-love to learn how to freely pour into yourself. Your well-being depends on it.
