Issues Are My Favorite Shoes...

Issues are my favorite shoes.

Baggage. We all have it. We pretend we don’t have it. If we don’t pretend we don’t have it, then we nod in ironic self-knowledge of “I have baggage," but it’s in service of the general feeling that, now that I’ve said it, you think I have a handle on it. It’s understood that the minute you’ve acknowledged what it is, you must let it go, and either tell everyone what was previously wrong with you or turn it into an app.

Most of all, you can’t bring it into a relationship. You can’t! No one wants your dirty socks, your broken heels, or your equally broken heart. Especially if it has been broken by someone with better abs. No one wants the sad love notes and phones numbers to landlines written on your sole, (or soul, you decide). But whatever love note or to-do list—it’s obviously illegal to something new. It’s too much work and the new person probably has baggage, too. People make fun of chaotic packers, but the truth is, the organizers can fit a lot more in their carryon, so beware.

We can’t bring baggage. But then, what can we bring? Toothbrush? Presumptuous on a first date, uncomfortable on a second date and super weird, if you randomly carry it around hoping to find it a home. Maybe between the third and the thirtieth date someone likes you so much that they will get you a whole new toothbrush and a drawer under the sink in the bathroom as a prize for not bringing anything else that belongs to you into the relationship. Pets, memories, last year’s jeans.

The thing is, we all have baggage. It doesn’t go away. It’s what makes us who we are. Just like all the delicious cells, meat loving blood types, and sexy neural pathways that pulse beneath our vulnerable little shells. This doesn’t mean that you should haul all your baggage, arrange it on top of someone else’s head and demand that they love you anyway. Fresh baggage can be dealt with. Old baggage tends to be there and has formed the person whose body you now want to invade. You want to say that you love them for their mind, but in the first throes of wanting to make a ship out of your relation, it’s never really about the mind, is it? Bodies and faces tend to disguise minds and there you are. Bodies are like houses. They house who you are. I’m not going to make a sad illusion that whomever you have chosen to crown with some of the most spectacular highlights of your baggage is some empty house with no foundation. They can, however, very well be a full house with electricity and fire in the walls. For you. Maybe not for someone else. Maybe some people like crossed wires and static. Maybe some people like to steal the copper. Because no matter where we go, there we are, on greener grass and more sturdy glass houses and no matter where that is, baggage and issues must come with us. We accept that about ourselves. Other people’s baggage, however, has to stay exactly where it was born; in the ex-girlfriend’s fifth story walk-up. The one with the roaches.

I feel, in a moment that might be some serious self preservation, that the people we should go looking for to get on our yacht of a relationship, should be people who acknowledge their baggage and their issues; and who sift through those things on a regular basis, know where things come from, what they are. The people you want to look for are not people who need help, but people who need support. You should be one of those. You should want that, too. You with your sexy designer baggage and your posh and worthwhile it-shoes. What you think you are attracted to in another person at first sight is always their outsides. You think. But I would venture to say that the issues, baggage, and their good stories are often what you read on their face and mistake for good bone structure.

There is, however, baggage that we might not be very excited to unpack. It just that it can’t stay packed. If you keep that baggage under lock and key with a name tag on it, you become an emotional nomad and you are probably what people call a commitment-phobe, and/or you’re someone who doesn’t like to disappoint people. This is when lesser beings will call you damaged. And when lesser beings find a person they categorize as damaged, they will feel that it’s ok to damage them more, that their dent won’t show. This is why all those issues must come out of the baggage, and where your issues can actually become your salvation. They can actually shield you from someone else’s unacknowledged shortcomings. Remember that. You don’t want a freaking emotional amateur with their little greasy hands on your pain.

People who know how you pack your bag and love you anyway are the people you want to keep. The people who think you know how you pack your bag and use it against you must go. It’s that simple. And when you’re the one that’s leaving, remember not to pick up their shitty baggage in their shitty apartment decorated with—not antiques, but just really old shit. There’s a difference—when it comes to furniture and issues alike.

A lot of your baggage will usually be something that you’re not really responsible for picking up, but now that you have it, make it work for you, instead of just trying to get rid of it. The things that we have been given to carry in this life can be insanely painful when we are scared to look in our bags. But those issues truly are what can set us free to create more and better, emotionally high baggage with other people, places, and situations. We are here to start shit. And to end shit. And start shit again. And confuse things with something else and repeat things with people who didn’t necessarily start the dance in the first place but knows the steps. And if you are the person in the good shoes, you can either match their steps or step on their toes and run. And if you can’t run in heels, you lack drama and timing, but that’s what running shoes are for. A clean getaway and a practical new start.

If you’re into that sort of thing.