A few articles ago, I compared our emotions to garbage.
The idea was pretty simple. You can ignore the garbage. Pile things on top of it. Stay busy enough to convince yourself everything is fine.
But eventually, the garbage still has to go out.
I’ve thought about that analogy a lot since.
Mostly because I forgot to ask one pretty important question.
What if the garbage isn’t yours?
Imagine someone pulls up to your house and drops three giant bags of garbage right on your front porch.
Not the little kitchen bags either.
I’m talking about the contractor-size bags that are ripping at the seams. The kind where you’re already wondering what in the world is leaking out before you even get close.
You didn’t create the mess. You didn’t put it there. And you definitely didn’t invite someone over and say, “If you’ve got some overflowing trash, my porch is available.”
But there they are.
Someone else’s garbage.
My first reaction would probably be, what the hell?! This isn’t mine. I’m not touching it. I didn’t put it here.
And I’d be right.
The person who created the garbage should come back, pick it up, and deal with it.
But what if they never do?
Maybe at first you leave the bags exactly where they are because, on principle, they’re not your responsibility.
The problem is, garbage doesn’t politely sit on your porch waiting for the right person to come back.
It starts to smell. The bags start to rip. Things start leaking out. Maybe something gets stuck to the bottom of your shoe and, without even realizing it, you track it through the front door.
Now there is garbage in your entryway.
Your husband is dragging some of it through the kitchen. Your kid stepped in something. The dog probably ate something she definitely should not have.
And the whole time you are standing there thinking, This isn’t even my garbage.
You’re right.
It isn’t.
But now it’s in your house.
That’s the problem.
Maybe you get really good at living around it.
You learn which part of the porch to step over, and after a while, you barely notice the smell anymore.
But just because you stopped noticing the smell didn’t mean everyone else did.
And that’s where things get complicated.
Because dealing with the mess can start to feel a lot like taking responsibility for how it got there.
For a long time, I think I confused taking responsibility for my life with taking responsibility for everything that had happened to me.
Some of those bags have been sitting there longer than I realized.
Some were dropped off when I was a kid, long before I knew I was allowed to question what was inside them.
I learned how to read a room. How to keep the peace. How to make myself easy to deal with.
At the time, I didn’t think of any of that as garbage.
I thought that was just what your house was supposed to smell like.
It took me a long time to realize it wasn’t.
I didn’t put this here.
So why should I have to be the one to clean it up?
Honestly, I wish I had a better answer.
It isn’t fair.
And for the record, I still think the person who left it should come pick it up.
I would love to be able to call someone and say, “Hi, yes. Someone left their emotional garbage at my house [insert year]. Can you come get it?”
But being right about who created the mess wasn’t making my house any cleaner.
I could spend years waiting for someone to come back and remove it. Waiting for an apology. Waiting for someone to understand the impact of what they did. Waiting for life to somehow become fair retroactively.
Maybe they will.
Maybe they won’t.
Either way, the garbage is still sitting on my porch.
Eventually, I had to stop asking who should take the garbage out and start asking who was actually living with it.
I wasn’t taking the garbage out for them.
I was taking it out because I live here.
And maybe that’s the part I’ve struggled with most.
I’ve had to unlearn things I never taught myself and clean up things I didn’t make a mess of in the first place.
Some days, I can understand that and feel proud of how far I’ve come.
Other days, I still want to know why the person who made the mess isn’t the one standing here holding the bag.
And yes…
That sucks.
There really is no prettier way to say it.
But taking out the garbage doesn’t make it mine.
It just means I’ve decided I don’t want to live with it anymore.
I can’t change who left the bags on my porch.
But I can decide how much longer they stay.
So I’m taking them to the curb.
Simply Sonia 