Excess Baggage

A metaphorical ditty about the psychological stowaway that came home with me.

I travel light now.

That took a long time to learn. I used to pack for every version of myself that might be needed. The capable one. The available one. The one who never inconveniences anyone. The one who moves before she's asked because waiting to be asked means someone might see that she needed a moment first.

I got home from vacation still carrying the time zone in my body. Jet lagged. Quiet. Needing the particular silence that only exists in the first hours back before the world remembers you're available again.

My team reminded me we had a council meeting at 4pm.

And I started moving.

Not consciously. Not after weighing it up and deciding yes this is the right thing. My body just started moving toward it the way it has moved toward a thousand things I didn't choose. The automatic compliance. The reflexive availability. The muscle memory of a woman who learned very young that her peace was the first thing on the table when anyone else needed something.

I was halfway there before I stopped.

And heard myself say something I have been practicing for years without knowing I was practicing it.

No. I don't owe them my peace.

Just that.

Not I'm sorry I can't make it. Not let me check my capacity. Not I'll try to be there but I'm not feeling great.

Just no.

The stowaway did not like that.

That's what I'm calling it now. The stowaway. The psychological remnant of every version of me that was conditioned to move before she was asked, to shrink before she was told to, to hand over her peace like it was a toll she owed just for taking up space.

It hid in my luggage through the whole vacation. Stayed quiet while I exhaled somewhere far from my regular life. Waited.

And the moment I got home and the calendar notification appeared and my body started moving toward someone else's schedule before it checked in with mine, it surfaced.

Because that's what stowaways do.

They wait for the moment that feels most like the original territory. The moment that smells like the old conditioning. The moment that matches the pattern your nervous system learned to recognize as: this is when you move. This is when you make yourself available. This is when your needs go in the overhead compartment.

I closed my eyes for a moment after I said no.

And that's when the image came.

A young mother. Frozen. Two daughters nearby. A terror so complete it became a posture, a personality, a way of moving through every room she ever entered for the next thirty years. Not because she was weak. Because she was conditioned inside a structure that told her his needs were the weather and her job was to read it correctly.

That woman's body knew how to move toward other people's agendas before her own needs finished forming a thought.

I inherited her nervous system.

And she inherited it from her mother.

And her mother from hers.

Generations of women who packed light in all the wrong ways. Who left their own needs at the departure gate because there wasn't room in the overhead compartment for both their peace and everyone else's comfort.

This is phantom pain.

Not therapy language. Not a diagnosis. Just the echo of something real that shaped the tissue of who I became. The limb is gone. The nerve endings still fire. The marriage ended decades ago. The freeze response still surfaces when a calendar notification arrives on day one back from vacation and my body starts moving before my mind catches up.

The difference now is I catch it.

I named the stowaway out loud.

I put my bag down in my own kitchen and I said no.

I don't owe them my peace.

That sentence didn't come from a self help book. It didn't come from a therapist's office or a recovery meeting or a personal development seminar.

It came from a woman who has been unpacking the same baggage for long enough to finally recognize whose name was on the tag.

It was never mine.

It was handed down.

And I am the woman in this line who leaves it at the airport.

Not because I've arrived somewhere perfect.

Because I finally know what I'm carrying.

And I know what it costs to keep checking it.

That same question of inheritance, of who we serve first and what we've been conditioned to give away without noticing, follows founders into their work too. In this week's podcast, Arlene and Louis Byrd bring that same honesty to the table, sharing the raw realities of launching Hiyer, a platform built on authentic community and racial equity — and what it takes to lead with integrity once you know exactly what you're carrying. Listen HERE.