Writing “The Blue Duffel Bag:” A Story from a Delusional Mind

I have the cluttered mind of a writer. Words and ideas swirl in my head like autumn leaves caught in a wind tunnel. Post-it® notes adorn every nook and cranny in my office, and my desktop looks like Swiss cheese cluttered with dozens of folders for various writing projects like “Finished blogs,” “Essays in the work,” “Stories to Pitch,” “Memoir,” etc. I also keep a running list on my phone’s notepad app of story ideas that come to me randomly, like when I am filling gas, grabbing a coffee, or waiting to pick up my kids from birthday parties or sporting events. But, nowhere will you find a single note I’ve written about my recently published essay in Literary Mama, The Blue Duffel Bag: A Journey from Beirut to America.

I may be a messy writer, but I am not delusional. Yet, delusional may be a more fitting description when it comes to The Blue Duffel Bag because the concept for the essay manifested itself as a nagging plea—rather than an idea. 

Every morning for about a month in the summer of 2022, I heard a voice whenever I walked into my closet where the bag had sat dormant for over a decade, urging me to write about it. 

Day after day, I laughed the voice off. 

Day after day, I ignored it and went about my business. 

Day after day, I thought I was losing my mind. 

Sick and tired of this nagging feeling, I finally gave in. One morning I took the bag out of the drawer. I placed it on the ground—cautious, nervous, meticulous in my actions as if I were exploring a sacred site—worried about breaking a zipper or unraveling another thread. 

One by one, I removed the bag’s content. On the floor in my closet, thousands of miles from where the bag’s journey began, I stared at a time capsule of memories and sacrifices.

A few days after taking the bag out of its resting place, and with the voice in my head getting louder, I put it on my desk in my office and stared at it not knowing where or how to begin to write about an old, lifeless, worn-out bag. I struggled to reach into my heart and pour my emotions onto the pages without sounding angry or bitter. So, I turned to my journal and allowed it to become my sounding board. Morning after morning and page after page, I unpacked the emotional baggage that prevented me from understanding what the blue duffel bag represented.  

The first few drafts I wrote about the bag were elementary at best. My 11-year-old could have written a better essay. I threw words on a page and let the big picture crystallize. And it did—two months and many drafts later. 

Once I felt I had an essay worth publishing, I joined an online Essay Writing Class to sharpen my writing skills, especially since I had never penned my story before. The instructor with whom I shared a draft was impressed and labeled this writing “Objective Correlative.”

Even with a master’s degree in English, I had never heard of the term “Objective Correlative,” which I learned was coined in the 19th century by the painter Washington Allston in his lectures on art “to suggest the relationship between the mind and the external world.” The poet T.S. Eliot later described it as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.”

Literary theories aside, I now faced the hurdle of pitching the essay. In the world of publishing, I got lucky. I was rejected twice before being accepted by Literary Mama with a caveat—make the essay longer and dig deeper. 

For someone who had resisted revisiting her past for decades or owning her own story, being asked to “dig deeper” was like rubbing salt in a wound. Guided by a few probing questions from the wonderful editors at Literary Mama, I was able to reach into my past and transform a 750-word story about a duffel bag into a 1,500-word essay.

In the process of writing The Blue Duffel Bag, I fell in love with the “Objective Correlative” writing technique. I admit it’s not easy to take an object and build an emotionally-filled story around it. But, like an antique piece, it could reveal untold stories and unravel raw and authentic emotions. 

As for the voice in the closet? It stopped when I began writing the essay. However, the night before it was published, I dreamt of telling my mom I wrote about her blue duffel bag. All I heard was her voice, replying, “I know.”