Memoir: Unpacking Your Post-Breakup Baggage Is Hard To Do

The last time I wrote about my personal life was when I was young and naive and had just stepped foot in New York City. Things had just ended with someone I now sincerely wish I had never met, and back then, Internet overshare seemed like a really good idea. The damn thing still comes up if you Google me.

After that, I became a little wary of writing anything about myself, but when I tell people I’ve written a book called The Frisky 30-Day Breakup Guide, I get the inevitable question: Was it inspired by a breakup of yours?

Abso-freaking-lutely.

I usually keep feelings and stories like this wrapped up and stored far beneath the surface of what my life is now, but this is one searing memory, among a few, that inspired the 30-Day Breakup Guide.

Back in 2007, I discovered this: Over the course of a three-and-a-half year relationship, if you and your boyfriend haven’t lived together, you accumulate roughly 25 medium-sized paper shopping bags of second-tier possessions that you’ve temporarily parked at his apartment. When you have different apartments, the good clothes and expensive products and beloved novels never make the cut for his place. You bring over half-empty bottles of trial-size shampoo, the cheap drugstore blush you bought in a frenzy rather than your good Clinique rouge, shirts that will pass for the Wednesday workday but that you really should have donated to charity two years ago, a sterile but bestselling business book you found on the clearance shelf.

You don’t know it at the time, but it’s easy for him to lift them right out.

It was all too civil, the entire post-breakup transaction with my ex, whom I’d dated for the aforementioned three and a half years. He’d conveniently arranged not to be in his apartment while I, along with my two friends, rode the elevator up to his place for the last time to collect my things. My clothes, my makeup, my books.

When I opened his door with the key he had made for me a year ago, 25 paper shopping bags were in neat cubes, all laid out on the floor like 3-D tiles. He had printed out my favorite recipes — chicken and biscuits, saffron rice, curried yams (he was a more of a cook than I’ll ever be) — and fastened them together with a tight binder clip. “Take whatever you want from the fridge,” he had written on a stark-white sheet that topped the bunch. “Your friend, Travis.”

After we moved all of those things away from his place and into my 9-foot-by-10-foot bedroom, the 25 bags had eaten up the last luxury of space I had in my shared Midtown walkup: three square feet buffeted by my window, my dresser, my bed, and my desk. But for one whole month, even after my only walking/dramatic-pacing space had been compromised, I couldn’t open the bags. I knew I must have had a couple of dresses in there — I had to trust that I did — but I couldn’t open them and look inside. I’d only remember where they belonged in his closet.

Fast-forward three years.

Looking back, there were exactly two things in those 25 bags that I genuinely valued: a signed novel by one of my favorite authors that I mistakenly left at his place (Kathleen Tessaro’s Elegance, for the book junkies out there) and a bottle of garnet-red Essie nail polish (the color Scarlett O’Hara, for the varnish junkies out there). The rest, the second it hit my bedroom floor, I should have bagged up, dragged downstairs, and left for the next morning’s garbage pickup while brushing my hands off and whistling a merry tune.

If I could go back and shake my 2007 self, I would tell her this: “The longer you let that stuff — the leftover stuff that sat crumbling in his apartment for three years — sit in your place, the harder it’s going to be to move on. To move up. So the relationship didn’t work. It happens. It’s not all your fault. You don’t have to prove to the universe that you took the freshly dead relationship seriously by hanging onto a track-and-field T-shirt from junior high that you sometimes wore to sleep in while you were at his place.” (I also would have told my 2007 self not to cut all of her hair off into a pixie bob in 2009, but that’s beside the point.)

Unfortunately, versions of ourselves three years from now can’t come back, Terminator-style, to warn us about the consequences of what we’re doing. All we have after a breakup, when what we really want to do is drink $7 shiraz and sit, whimpering, Facebook-stalking, and staring at our past, is other women who’ve been there before. They’re the ones who will tell us to cut the crap, sit up, and take action: Get out of bed. Have a champagne-soaked picnic with your best friend. See Arcade Fire in concert. Debate the merits of artist Marlene Dumas’s latest work with your most hardheaded co-worker. Knit the hell out of that scarf you’ve been working on. Run around your local track three times, screaming the lyrics to Hole’s greatest hits. Just take action. Kick something. Make something. Do.

The Frisky 30-Day Breakup Guide is a no-nonsense, girlfriend-to-girlfriend instruction manual for every woman who doesn’t know what to do with her hands after she suddenly finds herself alone. No good is going to come from sitting still while the world spins around you, chica. And I’m here to snap you right out of that mind-set. Just like I would have done to myself three years ago.

Jamie Beckman is the author of The Frisky 30-Day Breakup Guide, out this summer.