The Backpack You Didn’t Know You Were Carrying

Change is hard.
Growth is hard.
Letting go of your past is hard.

If it were easy, we wouldn’t resist it so much. We wouldn’t avoid the mirror. We wouldn’t cling to old stories that no longer serve us. Back in 2022, I took a mindset class. One of the chapters was called “The Backpack Chapter.” At the time, it barely registered. The idea was simple:

Everyone has their own backpack. It’s filled with the weight of their past. The question is—what are you carrying in yours that’s making your present so heavy you can’t envision your future?

I remember reading it and thinking, “Interesting concept.” But it didn’t land. It felt abstract, like something that applied to other people, not me.

Fast forward to 2025. Last week, after a particularly deep therapy session, I sat down to journal. Somewhere between my pen hitting the page and my thoughts spilling out, the truth surfaced like a wave I’d been swimming against for years.

My backpack felt heavy—too heavy—because I had been carrying the weight of my family on my back. Since childhood, I had somehow decided that their problems were my problems. Their struggles were my struggles. And even as I built a happy, joy-filled life with my partner, I was still seeking a level of support from my family that never came.

That absence hurt. So I carried it. And over time, that weight along with every unspoken responsibility I had assumed, added up to what felt like 350+ pounds. Not visible to the outside world, but exhausting to carry every single day.

The thing about emotional weight is you often don’t realize how much it’s slowing you down until you stop and take inventory. Back in 2022, I wasn’t ready to see it. I wasn’t ready to admit that part of my heaviness came from holding on to things that weren’t mine to hold.

But growth has a way of circling back to you when you’re ready. In my path of self-discovery, unlearning old patterns, and wanting to create a bigger impact in the world, I finally turned around and opened that backpack. And what I saw was startling: I had been hauling around the weight of my family’s expectations, their disappointments, their silence, their approval I never received.

Here’s the truth—when your present feels heavy, it’s hard to dream about your future. You can have a beautiful life on the outside, but if your inner world is overloaded with unprocessed weight, you’ll always feel like you’re walking uphill. That day, journaling gave me clarity. I realized I could set the backpack down. I could still love my family, still care about them, but I didn’t have to carry their burdens as my own.

Letting go doesn’t mean you’re abandoning people. It means you’re making space to walk freely toward the life you’re meant to live. And maybe that’s the hardest and most important part of growth—accepting that your past is part of you, but it doesn’t have to be your prison.

So I’ll ask you what I was asked in that mindset class three years ago:
What’s in your backpack? And is it time to set some of it down?