HOW TO CARRY BAGGAGE THAT WAS NEVER YOURS
Good evening. Or morning. Or whatever time you’re reading this. I live in multiple timelines, with one foot in Tokyo and the other in timelessness.
My Tokyo-self makes sure my kids wake up for school. In another timeline, I’m preparing to give a TEDx talk at the University of Northern Iowa about my favorite topic—kizuki, the Japanese aha-moment that reconnects us. In yet another, I stare at a blank page (aka the next chapter of my life), in mind-boggling awe over how I got myself here. That’s usually when I do my other favorite thing: I just close my eyes, allow myself to dissolve into the no one that I truly am. I call that meditation.
The through line is that I like to write. I write through it all, without waiting to—eergh—have landed on the other end. I think it started because writing was the lifeline I clung to that made me feel a little sane in the existential mess. But guess what? Twenty years later, I think I might have built a brand around the habit! If six-year-olds can make it on the Forbes list for sharing videos of them opening new toys and teenagers can make a living out of synchronized mini-dances that have no deep meaning, then surely, it must be possible for me to share about the time my mother scolded me for taking too much rice at dinner when I was five years old.
Yes, that happened. My mother said that I was いやしい. That’s like, a perverse version of “greedy.” Not because I was, but because she didn’t realize that I was in full-on survivor mode as the youngest of four kids, with an age gap, and if I ate at my own pace, there was never enough left for me. Due to this emotional scar, I was sixteen before I could finally have the security of my obento box all to myself, and re-teach myself to eat with a sense of safety after my brother and sisters had all left home.
My mother didn’t mean to leave a scar, but I was a child and already branded a perverse hoarder, at the dining table of our own home. Since then, my delicate psyche has learned to ration my joy like leftover rice—careful not to take too much in case someone else needs it. Or worse, because I had a belief that said that “I probably didn’t deserve it.” This is what therapists would call “baggage.” And what I, now in my prime, have come to call “golden material.” (Cue slightly unhinged laughter.)
Which brings me to anxiety. People think they “have anxiety,” but I have this theory that most of the time, the anxiety isn’t even theirs. Nine times out of ten, it’s inherited. Our nervous systems are just suitcases that generations before us over-packed with guilt, shame, modesty, and instructions on how not to be a nuisance to others. Most people have learned to just stay quiet and carry it around like it belongs to them. I decided to spit it out and write about it.
All that to say: yes—my emotional baggage has, against all odds, become the raw material from which I’ve built my brand. Wait, could that be true?! I built communities out of it. I created a journaling method out of it. I built an entire career teaching and guiding people how to look into their own messy suitcase and discover… Oh wait, that shirt? That shame? That fear of taking more rice than their siblings? It was never mine to carry.
Or, in our shared mental shorthand, “F%ck that sh@t.”
It turns out the point was never to fix myself—it was just to notice that the weight I was carrying was never mine in the first place. And that realization alone feels lighter than any perfect ending ever could.
In case your heart’s been dragging, maybe this is your cue. Let go of what was never yours, and build whatever the hell you want on the freedom that follows.