Girl Carrying Shit

The Stuff that Leaves Home with Me: An Essay

“YOU need to declare independence from stuff,” my then-boyfriend, now-husband, who travels with a single carry-on bag, one change of clothes, and a lone paperback that he leaves behind on the airplane, announced a few years back. We were standing in the street, and I had asked him to hold my store-bought cup of tea, so I could mine for my cellphone in the rubble at the bottom of my distended bag, while clutching a stack of mail with the armpit of my bagless arm.

The next day, having mulled the issue overnight, he said, in a tiptoeing, conflict-averse tone, “If we’re going to have one problem in our relationship”—we had just been talking about marriage—“it might be your explodingness.” Note: he did not say explosiveness. I don’t have an anger issue. He was eyeing the suitcase I had just brought back from a reporting trip, the motley contents of which had exploded all over our bedroom floor.

Wherever I go, I go with an entourage of stuff. Give me a purse the size of a stove, and I will fill it. Then, to accommodate the overflow, I will find another bag as big as a household appliance, and I will fill that, too. I’m not a hoarder. I don’t save tin foil, cereal boxes, or those plastic rings that yoke a six-pack together. The problem is not too much stuff in my home; it’s the stuff that leaves home with me. I’m like a nomad, hauling my worldly possessions on my back. This was a pain when I lived in Manhattan and schlepped around on foot, not so much when I moved out West—first to Los Angeles, and then to Livingston, Montana, and Las Vegas, Nevada, places where I am free to establish an unofficial second residence in my car.

Any excursion not undertaken by automobile remains an issue. Even if I’m in a minimalist mood, a plane trip entails a suitcase, a separate tote for toiletries (inexorable rule of packing: anything that can leak will leak), a backpack containing my laptop and several books for the plane (a bookless flight is an agonizing affair), and a purse swollen with various implements that will fortify me for or against any eventuality, from an impromptu night out to sudden famine. “It’s like you’re traveling by ocean liner,” a friend once teased. “Will you be accompanied by a porter?”

In truth, I long ago adjusted to lugging the bags around myself, to the hoisting, readjusting, and occasional pausing-to-rest that it requires. Only in the last few years, as airlines began to charge escalating fees per checked item, did my bags become, well, baggage—or at least a very expensive habit.

I have always wanted to be one those neat, fastidious, self-contained people, those human hospital corners whose svelte little purses smugly boast separate zipped pouches for makeup, loose change, and pens, whose wallets are not forever burping up receipts, whose carry-on slides effortlessly into the overhead bin without the full weight of a human being throwing himself or herself against it. (My therapist, a devotee of pouches herself, once suggested I try her method: The result was so many pouches that when a TSA Agent rummaged through my bag—a common occurrence—he saw them and exclaimed, “Lots of little purses!”)

In my early 20s, when I first encountered Joan Didion’s essay, “The White Album,” in which she describes taping to her closet door a list of items she’d need for any spur-of-the-moment trip—“The list enabled me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do,” she writes—I longed to emulate her work, but I also longed to emulate her life, to be the sort of ruthlessly organized person who would create such a list. (“To Carry: mohair throw, typewriter, 2 legal pads and pens, files, house key.”) The gesture seemed of a piece with the sharp, scalpel-like precision of her prose. Both were emanations of a rigorously disciplined mind.

“If you can pack a suitcase well, it means you have balanced your life,” Diane Von Furstenberg said in a 2009 profile that appeared in Delta Sky Magazine. I remember reading this article midflight, after suffering the public indignity of being forced to open up my suitcase in the ticketing line and pull out items to make weight. I took Ms. Von Furstenberg’s theory as a personal indictment. Her message couldn’t have been clearer: cluttered bag, cluttered mind.

Some years ago, when I still worked in an office, I began to suspect that my colleagues were eyeing the assemblage of odd bags at my feet, containing books I might finally decide to read or manuscripts I might finally choose to edit, and drawing negative conclusions. That was when I first I began to consider what my herd of disorderly totes signals. When I’m feeling rosy, I can convince myself that the carting of copious amounts of reading material indicates I’m a person of many enthusiasms with a penchant for hard work, and that my weedy bag demonstrates I’ve got loftier things to do than prune my possessions.

But with stuff, as with most matters, I take a darker view. I’m sure the bags categorize me alongside those people who keep too many animals—projecting a slide toward slovenliness, an almost-pathological personal disarray. They telegraph my chronic indecisiveness, my inability to commit (to a book, even to a color of lipstick), and that I don’t care a whit about the frumpy impression I’m making. (I don’t, but shouldn’t I pretend that I do?)

The book University of Success, Og Mandino’s compendium of self-help advice published in 1982, includes a chapter by Michael Korda titled, “How to Look Like a Winner,” that contains a further subsection called, “Carrying Things.” To quote Mr. Korda, in all his glorious bluntness: “O.K.: A successful woman carries a handbag. O.K.: A successful woman carries a briefcase. Not O.K.: A successful woman does not carry both.”

From a purely aesthetic perspective, a jumble of satchels is disagreeable to behold. After all, I’m not traveling with a five-piece set of Louis Vuitton luggage. Not too long ago, on a reporting trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma, my mismatched collection included: a Swiss Army suitcase with broken zippers (from sitting on it and yanking it shut); a dusty black vanity bag I’d acquired I-don’t-know-where; an L. L. Bean-style canvas carryall; a pale green Costco backpack that, like a car full of clowns, always seems to offer up more room; and my enormous, bucket-shaped red purse, its shoulder strap broken from regularly bearing heavy cargo.

“Packed Suitcase,” Amanda Fortini

But let’s get to the deeper issues. Carrying piles of one’s belongings is bizarrely self-defeating, especially if the idea is to substitute preparedness for neurosis. I have a rarely used inhaler somewhere in my bag, floating among half-filled notebooks and enough supplements to stock a small natural pharmacy, but if I ever had to deploy it, I’d expire midsearch. Being so encumbered also assumes a best-case scenario world: that the cab will arrive on time, that the terminal will be close by, that you will not have to dash anywhere, at any time, for any reason.

Perhaps my greatest lesson in this vein occurred during the New York City blackout of 2003. The only way out of my 26th-floor Chrysler Building office was to walk down as many flights of stairs, and then, because there were no cabs free to hail, down to my East Village apartment in 90-plus degree heat—all in a pencil skirt and high heels, with three monstrous bags strangling me.

Like the pain of childbirth, that experience was soon forgotten. It was not long before I was back on the stuff. I’ve tried to stop. I’ve set a weekly purse clean-out date on my planner. I’ve limited myself to one suitcase, and ended up having to buy an outfit for a last-minute job interview, thus reinforcing my original perverse logic. I’ve come to see my tendency to carry numerous bags as a means of managing anxiety; as a reaction to moving a lot as a child and to having a minimalistic, ruthlessly deaccessioning mother; as an outgrowth of my perfectionism, overzealously applied in some areas, and not at all in others.

In the end, I may simply be fighting a genetic pull from both sides. My dad was an early adopter of the man purse, back in the ’80s, and my late grandmother carried many of her possessions, everything from her diamond earrings to a stockpile of cheese cubes for snacking, in a sad array of wrinkled Ziploc bags she’d stuff into her grey leather “pocketbook,” as she called it.

I have even tried, in my half-hearted quest for emancipation, to forgo bags altogether. I’d read that another of my literary heroes, Susan Sontag, “refused to carry a purse,” as Sigrid Nunez writes in the essay “Sontag’s Rules,” published in the Fall 2009 issue of Tin House. “Men didn’t carry purses, hadn’t I noticed?” Ms. Nunez writes, channeling Ms. Sontag. “Why did women burden themselves?”

There are probably as many answers to this as there are uncapped pens in my purse. Yet the question itself is of interest. It reminds me of those frequently asked by men: “Do you need that? Why don’t you leave it at home?” But women will carry what they want to carry. I mean, come on, a handbag? With all the real burdens we bear, a bag seems, by comparison, pretty light.

—An earlier version of this essay appeared in The New York Times Styles section