Your Backpack

You are learning to be kind to yourself and take care of yourself, now it's time to talk about emotional baggage. We all have it and carry it with us but you may not realize how much it affects a work life balance. There is emotional baggage we take home from work with us, but there is also emotional baggage we take into work with us. Addressing this is an important foundational block but it is important for you to visit my blogs about self compassion and self care first. Those two posts will build up your emotional strength before we start addressing your emotional baggage from work and life and learn about a tool to help you maintain the balance between the two.

We are going to call this tool your Backpack. I first learned about this tool from my field placement supervisor when I was completing my ECE diploma course. The concept is simple. Where do you put your literal baggage? In a Backpack. Where do you put your backpack when you get home from work? Where do you put your backpack when you get to work? You don’t keep on your back while you are preparing your dinner, or doing evening chores. Just like you don’t keep it on your back when you are setting up the snack table or doing a diaper routine or leading circle. It’s a heavy uncomfortable physical hindrance that distracts you from the tasks at hand and the longer you carry it around the heavier it gets and the more it affects even the simplest of tasks. No, instead you take off your backpack and hang it on a coat rack or leave it on a bench and enter your home with no weight at all. You take it off and hang it with your coat at work or leave it in your cubby out of reach of the children and out of sight or mind. If only we could do the same thing with emotional baggage as we do with literal baggage. Well, you can!

Here is your task. As practice right now, find a piece of paper and draw a circle that takes up the page. This circle is your emotional baggage backpack. Your task will be to address your emotional baggage and write it all down within this circle. Simply address it like a thought or a checklist and write it down. There is no need to dread it or want to solve it right now. That is not what this task is about. The idea of this task is just to pack it all into your backpack. Remember this is YOUR backpack, there is no need to share this with anyone other than your therapist. This is personal, everyone’s backpack will be different. Different items with different fullness levels. But the point is we all have it, and we are all human because of it. The important thing that I want you to take away from this task is this. While yes this is your baggage it is your life, you don’t actually have to carry it with you all of the time. You don’t need to have these items weighing on your mind when you are home from a day of work or when you are working hard to carry out the responsibilities of your career. So address your emotional baggage and pack it in your backpack. You can have a work backpack and a life backpack too. If it helps, get another piece of paper and turn it landscape. Draw two circles beside each other and write work over one and life over the other. In the work circle I want you to write down any workday related stressors. In the life circle write down any life stressors external from work. There may be some cross over but overall what you want to be able to do is have a list of things you want to be able to let go of when you get home, and a second list of the things you want to let go of when you get to work.

Now this is just the exercise. Here is how you put it into practice. You wake up in the morning after a not so great night's sleep, it was a stressful evening because of an argument you had with your partner. You go about your morning preparing for work still dreading the previous evening and the night's sleep. You get to work and enter your classroom still feeling tired and anxious, the bustling classroom moves full force through the daily routine because this world just keeps turning but you are just going through the motions because you are tired and anxious. The simple stressors of the day are starting to pile up upon the way you are feeling as your day is coming to an end. There is now more of an anxious feeling as you are getting closer to returning to your partner at home to resolve your issues. But now you have also had an awful day at work that is now stacked on top of your stressful evening and restless night. So tired, anxious and weary from the day you address your argument and it doesn’t resolve and the cycle continues. We have all had a day or days like that. But what if.. You wake up in the morning after a not so great sleep, it was a stressful evening because of an argument you had with your partner. You acknowledge how you are feeling you take a moment to address it and your put it in your backpack. You go about your morning preparing for work with a clearer mind, your feeling from the night may come back but you simply label it again and put it back in the backpack. When you get to work you remind yourself of the thought that is in your backpack. The children in your class and your room partner don’t know what happened before you walked into that door and honestly they don’t need to know. All that matters is you are here and without the weight of your backpack you can be present with the children and you can fully immerse yourself in the joy and discovery to comes throughout the day. Occasionally you will rub your eyes and be reminded of why you are tired. But you will see the thought and put it back in your backpack. You don’t need it here, you can’t resolve it while you are at work so let it go while you are there. There will be stressors throughout the work day only you know what they are, but as they come, see them. Some may be important while your work day continues and that is fine but when you go home hang up your work backpack. You can now let go of work and unpack the weight of the previous night with a clearer mind. Address the issues with your partner with a freedom that doesn’t pull the stress of the day into the conversation. This may resolve your argument and it may not but just know you don’t have to carry it with you every moment of your day. You can pack it away and address it when necessary otherwise let it go. 

Now this is the ideal situation that you are able to unpack and pack the backpack effectively as moments and stressors come and go, but it will take practice. Just like it takes practice to be kind to yourself and care for yourself. In order to be successful in this skill you will need to tap into your compassion practice and allow yourself the space to breathe through the packing and unpacking. To remove the guilt while you are at home or at work. You don’t need to carry life at work and you don’t need to carry work in life. Unless you want to, it is your choice. This is all your choice. Choose to carry it and be weighed down by pain and stress that has nothing to do with the beautiful children of the world, or pack it away and let yourself be fully immersed in their beauty.