On my way back after a long hike, I saw an empty water bottle lying in front of me.

As I was getting closer, something inside told me to pick it up. I remember thinking, I don’t want to pick up someone else’s trash, but something inside kept nudging me anyway. So I picked it up and told myself I’d just carry it until the next trash can I saw.

It may or may not have been 100 degrees out that day, so after a while my hand began to sweat carrying the empty water bottle, and I thought, I don’t want to carry this anymore, I’m just gonna leave it. I hadn’t been the one who threw it there in the first place. It wasn’t mine. No one would know if I put it back down. But then I thought, what if someone saw me? They wouldn’t have known it wasn’t my trash. I wasn’t the one who littered; it was someone else’s. From the outside, it would just look like I was the one who littered.

I started thinking, at what point did the trash become mine? I realized the moment I chose to pick it up, it became my trash.

As I kept walking, still carrying someone else’s trash, I thought about how this sort of thing happens in life all the time. We’re going about our day feeling fine, and then all of a sudden you swear it was the devil incarnate you just met. One negative interaction and suddenly the rest of the day gets thrown off. It’s easy to blame the person and say they ruined our mood or gave us a sh*tty day.

Just last week, I was leaving work, pulling out of the parking lot when a car began tailing me and then pulled up next to me at a red light. They weren’t even in an actual lane; they pulled up just to harass me. The passenger, holding a loudspeaker, started calling me “faggot,” while the driver glared at me, flipping me off and mouthing for me to get out of the car.

Here I was, having just spent my day working as a therapist helping others and feeling good about being of service, and yet the moment caught me off guard and rattled me. I thought about what I often tell my clients. Instead of just chalking the incident up to road rage or assholes, I called a friend to share my experience vulnerably. I let myself, my fear, and my younger, more fragile parts be seen. I needed to release the fear and shame.

But standing there with someone else’s empty water bottle in my sweaty hand, it occurred to me that at some point, I had picked it up. I didn’t cause it nor did I ask for it, but I chose to carry it once I picked it up. At that point, it didn’t really matter where the trash came from anymore.

I thought about how often we do this with things that aren’t ours. Other people’s bad moods, their stress, their projections. Whether it’s with a friend, someone at work, a stranger, and especially social media, we pick up the negativity without realizing it and then walk around feeling irritated or heavy or distracted, wondering why we can’t shake it off. Carrying the bottle made me aware of how something small can start to take up more space than it deserves once we’re the one holding it, and how quickly our attention shifts from whatever we were enjoying to when we’ll finally be able to get rid of it.

Eventually, I came across a trash can and dropped the bottle inside. What stood out to me wasn’t that there had been trash on the trail in the first place. It was how long I chose to carry it once I picked it up.

I don’t think the takeaway is that we should never pick anything up. Coexisting with others on the same planet, it’s impossible not to. But there’s something worth paying attention to about when something becomes ours that doesn’t belong to us and how long we choose to keep holding onto it.

We don’t always get to choose what we come across during the day. But we do get to notice when we’ve picked something up that isn’t ours and decide what we want to do with it next.

Moral of the story, if you find yourself picking up someone else’s trash, it becomes yours. It’s totally okay to pick up trash, just make sure you dispose of it responsibly. 

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