As I began to face my childhood and early adulthood baggage, it was overwhelming. It felt SO heavy. I was dragging around this heavy, heavy shit with me, everywhere I went, and I had no idea how much it was weighing me down until I started to unpack it.

But each time I faced some of the stuff in there it got a little lighter. I started at the top, pulling out the most recent hurts, one by one, feeling them for real this time instead of pushing them back down and zipping up the bag again. I’ll never forget the night spent in foetal position, convulsing with sobs as I faced the heartache of a little girl being pinned down by a gang of older boys – never before had I felt that grief for the 8 year-old version of myself, and it hurt, and it ached, and then it was peaceful! It was like a rapid detox, and then eventually I went back to sleep and woke up in the morning energised and lighter, without so much as a puffy eye from the sobbing! It felt like magic to come through the other side.

Of course, there were many other things to face, and they weren’t all so speedy – some were complex, laden with the weight of many injured souls who never meant to hurt me, but did so all the same. Some of the stories had an intricate root system, and I began to view them as noxious weeds that were restricting my own growth. So once I had a taste for the freedom that came after the release, I began to slash and burn with vigour.

Letting go is the most powerful thing in the world for someone who has carried around hard things in her invisible suitcase. Everytime I excavated one of those deep-rooted weeds, I grew. I expanded into myself and began to learn who I actually was instead of who I thought I should be. I saw my therapist (I still see my therapist), I spoke the shame out loud and it lost its grip. I began to nurture the younger versions of myself, reassuring her that I was here now, making sure that she was safe, and that I would be protecting her and making decisions that were all about her safety from now on.

Michael Singer, my favourite spiritual guru, has this analogy about holding onto the things that are making us sick. He says that if you went to a restaurant and got food poisoning, you wouldn’t take home a container of that food, store it in a room and go in and take a bite from each day just to remind you how sick it made you – you’d make sure it was all thrown in the bin and you’d avoid going anywhere near that food again! The things we store inside ourselves are the same. When we’ve held onto our old, painful stories because we haven’t been able to face them and feel them, we’re making a mess inside of ourselves. It’s often literally making us sick to keep that in there.

My shadow parts have been down there, intertwined with that deep root system that wrapped around my old stories. Some of those parts were so dark that they clouded my brain. I couldn’t see clearly, and there was no room for the joy to flow through me. I really did not know that I was this beautiful bundle of energy, as beautiful as all of the loving souls around me, and it was just the rubbish I was holding onto that was making me look ugly in my own eyes. Now that I’ve done a solid spring clean, the light and the love are finding their way to the shadows, drowning them out with sunshine and nutrients. And I just continue to expand.

Now that I have excavated the majority of those weeds (I don’t know that the garden is ever COMPLETELY cleared out), my next job is to make sure that I don’t hold onto new rubbish, and things are definitely sent to test me out. Last night I received a message from someone I had cared for, but had moved on from, letting me know about some hurtful things he had done when we were together. It could be so tempting to align myself with this mistreatment and deceit, so I stood back and watched my ego become indignant and angry, and then I became fascinated with why he felt the need to reach out to me now, even though he is no longer in my life, and then I became a little amused, and curious, and then realised that this wasn’t MY problem – it was his! HE is the one with the toxic behaviours that he has to live with. I blocked his number, I let him know that I was letting it and him go, and I dumped it on the kerb to be picked up and taken away.

This life is not easy. It’s never going to be. We will go through periods wherer it feels like everything is smooth sailing, and then we’ll suddenly find the ground falling away from beneath us. We can always drown out the pain with drugs, alcohol, compulsive behaviours and other addictions. We can go numb and dissociate. Or we can take a deep breath, put on our big girl trousers, and face it.

And here’s the thing – feeling something will not kill you. What will kill you is holding onto your stuff, letting it mar your world – damage your relationships, your self-esteem, letting your attachment issues lead you through your days. This, I believe, leads to depression (it did for me), anxiety, low sense of self-worth. This is the things that can kill you. This is what has killed some of my loved ones.

You are not your stories. You are a beautiful being, full of light, with a brain that is capable of AMAZING things. Let yourself expand. Find your support people, prepare your body and your mind for some hard times, and get to work cleaning out your rubbish. I promise you will not regret it.