Bag Lady
In my opinion, Erykah Badu’s “Bag Lady” is such an important song for women. It takes an empathetic route to describe how so many of us go through life carrying too much, feeling overwhelmed and drained, empathy that we don’t always give ourselves. I always sang it as a little girl but was too young to grasp the lessons and advice in the lyrics. It wasn’t until I ‘kept on living’, heard it on a random day in my twenties and just crieddd. Interestingly enough, it came on shuffle 3 days after my 31st birthday this year while I was cooking and hit me hard again, but I feel I have a deeper understanding now of the importance of ‘packing light’ so let’s talk about it.
“I guess nobody ever told you, all you must hold onto is you” resonates with me as a woman actively trying to unlearn people pleasing and heal abandonment wounds. A lethal combination that has seemed to become a cycle that drained me. It took me some time to realize that in trying to force people to stay in my life who obviously did not want to or see value in doing so, I was abandoning myself! When you abandon yourself, you enter a space of desperation that lacks self-love, self-care, self-compassion and ultimately lose sight of yourself. You don’t see yourself the way you should, you doubt yourself and sometimes the worst happens, and you completely lose yourself. There is not a person, place or thing more important than you having YOU so hold on tight!
“You gone miss your bus, you can’t hurry up cause you got too much stuff” my current mental/emotional space has made me realize that it’s beyond time to learn to let go (like permanently throw it in the ocean type of let go) of so many things. Replaying moments of your life that you can’t undo and can’t change puts a heaviness on you. You have to ask yourself ‘why do I think I still deserve to carry this? why do I still think I deserve to be punished’, short answer: you dont! Unlearning has to be done in the way that so many of us process our life experiences or we’ll be the harshest to the person we should be the kindest to (ourselves). Clinging to what shoulda, coulda, woulda gets in the way of what can and will. Reminding yourself of regrets, shame, and disappointments will have you forgetting you deserve clarity, pride and happiness. Aht-aht Sis!
“If you start breathing, you won’t believe it! It’ll feel better, so much better baby!” and that’s a mighty word for a woman who has a tendency of holding her breath without realizing it. Sometimes you have to step back from what the past is trying to convince you about your present self. Step out of what’s got you overthinking, in a rut, or emotional so that you can get to the root and start to heal it. Put down the to-do list, step off the hamster wheel of life and remind yourself that everything is okay, that YOU are okay, everything will be okay and breathe.
As I step into my ‘Pack Light Era’ and encourage myself to let go of the things that no longer serve me so that I can shift into alignment with the things God has for me, I want to encourage all of us to trust Erykah when she says “I bet you LOVE can make it better” and that love starts within ourselves.
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