Ghosting.

The concept of ghosting is the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication (courtesy of Wikipedia).

I’ve been ghosted on, more than once, let me tell you it’s not pleasant. Ever. Being ghosted on leaves you doubting yourself, questioning your every move, wondering whether or not the next person would ghost on you too. It leaves you second-guessing every message you sent, every phone call you make, every social media attempt… It’s harsh, really. There you are, talking to someone constantly, and all of a sudden… it just stops. Elvis Presley called it, “return to sender”, only that there is nothing returning, it leaves an incredibly empty void.

I am not going to go into details, there is not much to tell (not after they ghosted anyways). But here is the interesting thing. I am an avid social media user, it’s easy to get a hold of me (way too easy actually), and so each of these past lives ghosts have reached out to me. I don’t know what has possessed them, trying to crawl back into my mind space, but here they were, each and every single one of them (not that there were many but a few). And each of them apologized for what they did to me. I always thought that the simple act of an apology was everything I needed to not doubt myself anymore, to not second-guess my every move. Turns out, nope. That’s not the case.

Apologies and all are nice, but the damage was done. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hold a grudge, I’m like Tinkerbell, I only feel one emotion at a time and I cannot feel angry and happy at the same time but sometimes I need to feel angry so that seconds later I can feel happy. I’ve always been like that, wearing my emotions on my sleeves (just be sure not to be anywhere close to me, when I’m hangry, that’s not a place you want to be at). But the apologies? They did nothing for me, maybe because they all came so late, maybe because I already had moved on entirely to a different chapter, in a different book, in a library far far away, but mostly, because the thing that bothered me so much, about ghosting, had nothing to do with me.

I guess, that’s the moral of the story, that people do very very very stupid things to you, that have absolutely nothing to do with you. People act and react before they can actually think about their actions and sadly, there is always someone suffering silently or not so silently. The pain you feel, that will stick with you, there is a rare chance the pain will ghost on you but regardless, it will leave a scar.

At Christmas it’s especially important not to ghost on people, because Christmas and winter in general is a very tough time for many people. It’s important to stay connected, to reach out to others and don’t think for a second that you are alone and that the world is going to ghost on you. It won’t. We are all in this together and no-one, especially around the holidays, deserves to be ghosted on or become a ghost themselves, isolated from all the people that they love and whom they are loved by.

So, if you know someone suffering from depression or mental health issues, reach out, and seek help. Depending on where you are in there world, there is all kinds of help available to you! Know that even if one single person ghosted on you, that doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve love, it doesn’t mean that you are meant to be alone forever, it just means that, that person did not have you on their mind when they made that decision for themselves. You are wonderful and you are amazing and you do deserve everything you could possibly wish for.