It’s Their’s; Not Your’s To Own

If it’s theirs, it’s not yours to own.

I had a conversation today that took me back to a time when I first started working in a salon. The bathroom floor was rotten and carried a horrible fish like smell. One day, I walked out and another stylist went in behind me. The next day, someone had placed a Summer’s Eve kit in my shampoo caddy.

Another time, I leaned over near a stylist and she looked at me and said, “Oh, you took a shower today.”

At the time, those moments were meant to make me question myself. They were designed to embarrass me, isolate me, and make me feel small.

Age and healing will teach you something that insecurity never can:

Not everything thrown at you belongs to you.

Some women carry a mean girl spirit long after the school hallways are gone. They grow older, but the behavior never grows up. The whispers become workplace gossip. The teasing becomes passive aggressive comments.

The bullying becomes exclusion, humiliation, and carefully disguised “jokes.”

Sometimes, when a person cannot find something wrong with you, they will create something.

That is what projection does.

People will hand you their insecurity and call it your flaw. They will hand you their jealousy and call it your attitude. They will hand you their cruelty and somehow convince you that you deserved it.

You don’t have to accept the package.

I spent enough of my life wondering what was wrong with me when I should have been asking what was hurting inside of them so badly that humiliating another woman made them feel powerful.

Today, I understand.

What belongs to me, I will own. I will correct it, heal it, apologize for it, and grow from it.

But what belongs to you?

I’m giving that shit back, its yours to deal with.

To My Son’s:

One of the greatest lessons I hope you learn in this life is how to recognize what belongs to you and what belongs to someone else and let that shit go immediately.

Take responsibility for your mistakes. Own your actions. Apologize when you’re wrong. Learn, grow, and do better. Never carry someone else’s insecurity, anger, jealousy, trauma, expectations, or inability to see your worth.

People will sometimes try to hand you things that were never yours to carry. They’ll project their pain onto you and expect you to question yourself because of it.

Don’t.

You can love people without carrying their burdens. You can understand someone’s pain without allowing it to become your pain. You can forgive someone without giving them unlimited access to you.

Know yourself well enough to say, “That belongs to you. I’m not carrying it.”

Protect your peace. Protect your heart. Most importantly, protect the person you know yourself to be.

Life is already heavy enough without carrying baggage with someone else’s name on it.

Own what’s yours. Fix what’s yours. Grow from what’s yours. And whatever isn’t yours—let that shit go. Immediately.