The Two-Handbag Life: What’s in an Influencer’s (Real) Bag?

I have a theory that you can learn everything you need to know about a person from the contents of their handbag. Not the one they show you, of course. Not the curated, pristine, leather vessel they display on a café table, angled just so, with a single, artfully placed tube of lipstick peeking out.

I’m talking about the other bag. The real one.

You know the one. It’s the bag that lives in the passenger seat of your car, a chaotic ecosystem of crumpled receipts, rogue Tic Tacs, and the ghosts of a thousand forgotten to-do lists. It’s the bag that holds the evidence of our real, messy, beautifully complicated lives.

We’re all living a two-handbag life, aren’t we? We have the public bag we carry, and the private one that carries us.

The Public Bag: A Curated Collection

Let’s start with the bag we all know and love (or love to judge). This is the bag of our better selves, the one we aspire to carry. It’s the kind of bag that suggests its owner has never, not once, discovered a melted chocolate bar in its depths.

Inside this mythical creature, you will find:

• A Wallet That Closes Properly. The cards are neatly filed, the cash is crisp, and there isn’t a single, faded loyalty card for a frozen yogurt shop that closed in 2017.
• One Perfect Lipstick. The shade is timeless, the cap is secure. It has never been used to write a desperate note on a napkin.
• Elegant, Functional Keys. They are on a single, tasteful ring, not a janitor-style carabiner that also holds a bottle opener and a tiny, non-functional flashlight.
• A Phone with a Full Battery. The screen is clean, the case is chic, and the owner has never experienced the unique, cold-sweat panic of being at 2% in an unfamiliar part of town.
• A Tiny, Leather-Bound Notebook. The thoughts inside are presumably as neat and well-organized as the handwriting.

This is the handbag of a woman who has her life together. It’s a Chanel 2.55, a classic, quilted symbol of having arrived. It’s a statement piece that says, “I am serene, I am successful, and I have never had to use a dry-shampoo-as-deodorant in a pinch.”

It’s a beautiful story. It’s also, for most of us, a complete work of fiction.

The Private Bag: A Glorious, Chaotic Mess

Now, let’s talk about the bag that tells the truth. This is the bag of our actual selves. It’s less a fashion accessory and more a mobile storage unit for our anxieties. If my real handbag could talk, it would probably just sigh and ask for a painkiller.

If we were to do an honest “what’s in my bag” reveal, I suspect the contents would look a little more like this:

• A Graveyard of Lip Balms. At least five of them, all missing their caps, all coated in a fine layer of dust and crumbs. None of them are the one you were actually looking for.
• A Receipt Collection That Could Finance a Small Nation. They are from every store you’ve visited in the last six months. You are keeping them for a reason you can no longer remember, but you are certain it was very, very important at the time.
• Snack-Related Detritus. A single, rogue almond. The wrapper from a granola bar you ate three weeks ago. A suspicious stain that might be chocolate but could also, conceivably, be mud.
• A Phone on 7% Battery. And a charging cord with frayed wires that only works if you hold it at a very specific, prayer-like angle.
• A Surprising Detail Worth a Thousand Words. This is the item that tells the real story. It’s the thing that reveals the gap between the person you pretend to be and the person you actually are.

For me, it’s a pair of emergency socks. Not cute socks. We’re talking thick, utilitarian, deeply unsexy socks. Why? Because my public self loves stylish but impractical shoes, and my private self knows that at some point, my feet are going to stage a rebellion.

For the heroine in my new novel, Everly Reed, the ultimate surprising detail is a pair of brutally practical, mud-colored work boots. They are heavy, they are hideous, and they represent everything her curated, Chanel-carrying public persona is not. They are a symbol of a life that is about to get very, very real.

Which Bag is Worth Carrying?

We all juggle these two lives, don’t we? There’s the polished, filtered version of ourselves that we present to the world, the one with the perfect handbag and the serene smile. And then there’s the private version, the one with the emergency socks and the snack wrappers and the quiet, messy anxieties.

The heroine in my new novel, Her Last Filter, is living the ultimate two-handbag life. Her journey is about figuring out which one is worth carrying. It’s about the messy, complicated, and often funny process of shedding the person you pretend to be to make room for the person you were meant to become.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re caught between the person you pretend to be and the one you really are, you might see a bit of yourself in her story.

So, I have to ask: what’s the most surprising, honest, and secretly revealing thing in your “real” handbag right now? I’d love to hear about it.