Crash space, maybe

Do I know anyone in or near Savannah, Georgia (or other coastal-ish community) that could offer a couple folk crash space for one night?

I know lots of people around Atlanta but that's too far away.

Journaling project, Day 5

Oftentimes you don’t even realize you’re blocking your own present blessings by holding on to the past. Do your best to let go. You are not your bad days. You are not your mistakes. You are not your scars. You are not your past. Be here now and breathe.

Who are you in this moment, without the baggage?

This sort of thing is the kind that makes me want to tell the speaker "fuck off." Maybe I am my baggage and my scars and my accumulated mistakes. Maybe I wear them proudly because they show I survived shit and did NOT jump off a roof when that urge came strong upon me and I did not drink myself blind to blot out pain and I did not channel my anger into harming myself or others. I am exactly my past - a human being is a vector through time, not a point that exists only in the present. One of the greatest joys in my life right now is looking at the child I'm about to send off to college and simultaneously seeing the tiny baby who curled up on my chest for much of the first three days of that child's life.

I'm not going to pretend my own life was entirely easy, nor that it was as hard as many others. It just is what it is. A misery contest only has losers, no winners. I admit there are probably other ways to live than how I've chosen, given how I got here, but I can't visualize them. This is what therapy is for, I guess.

And who I am without the baggage is... nothing, I suspect. Nobody walks around without baggage; the trick is not to let it weight you down too much, and to figure out how to put such of it down as you can when you can. At a minimum, a person without their "baggage" is a radically different human being. And let's not forget that what's "baggage" in one context is wholly different in another. It's boorish, at best, to bring up your prior marriage at a casual dinner party; however, it's dishonest or worse to try and form a new marriage without discussing what happened in the past with your current partner.

"Baggage" also varies with the times. Prior to 2016 it was true, but not particularly foregrounded in my mind, that my mother-in-law literally fled Europe ahead of Nazi death squads. I can't begin to describe how much that bit of "baggage" has shaped my opinions and reactions in the last 500+ days. Is that "baggage"? Who gets to decide if it is or isn't?

(If you're getting the sense that I'm not doing well with these writing prompts you're probably right. I feel like they're aimed at a different sort of person. I'll keep on with them, at least for a while. But likely not this weekend.)