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How to Be Haunted
On ghosting and ghosts and the hunger for peace
We’re haunted, you and I.
The thing about ghosting is the thing about suicide. Suicide doesn’t end the pain, it just transfers it onto the people who love you. Ghosting doesn’t block the pain of going through a break-up, it just transfers all the grief onto the other person. There’s no way out of pain but through it. Everything else is just shuffling our feet, whacking each other with the trauma baton in a futile attempt not to feel the crack ourselves.
Everyone is just you. Your pain has nowhere else to go. It will remain until it is dealt with, and if you don’t deal with it, you force someone else to do it for you.
Really, we’re all haunted. Every last one of us has ghosts that dog our steps. The trauma of our ancestors lives on in our bodies, in our culture, in our buildings and our land. There is nowhere to run because nothing is outside of this. Everyone we encounter, every place we go, every word we speak is loaded like a gun with the bullet of that pain. The only thing we really get to choose is whether to shoot or try to melt the metal and sculpt it into something beautiful.
It’d be nice if life was more complicated, but the core of the choice is always simple. Here, in this moment, with this situation, which path will you…
