Ghost Girl
I see you
The God’s honest truth is this: I don’t know how to live.
Exist? Yes. Hover? Absolutely. But live? For twenty-three years, I have haunted the corners of life like a fledgling ghost, unable to spook or excite, I sat in the margins waiting for some untraceable thing. Only now have I realized that the “thing” is life. It’s almost as if everyone else got the memo but me. They accept our current universe for what it is and what it brings, and so they live. Yet at this ripe age, I’ve accepted nothing, neither abhorrent nor beautiful. On one end, I’m hollow, wispy, suspecting, on the other, I’m a walking nerve end. I dream vividly, imagine wholly, and feel completely, which makes for a compassionate yet disturbed existence. I would say the flip side is great art (and I’m sure it is for someone more mature than I), but right now that, too, is waning.
I’ve prayed about this state of existence before, “It’s too much!” I’ve done all I can to shrink from it, yet here it is back in my face. I’ve hissed the words of others in hopes they were right: “You’re so much drama.” “Don’t be so sensitive!” “It’s like you want something to be wrong.” But I know something is profoundly wrong, and I can feel it. I look at others and wonder if they can feel it too, the groaning, disturbed quality of earth, but they’re giggly and eager to dismiss. Maybe I’m losing my mind. Perhaps I’m not built for a world slow to heal but quick to cut. I wonder what it would be like to evaporate. To crawl to the back of a cave and never come out, just like I did when I was a kid, and everything felt like a threat. Where I floated in the clouds and watched myself play.
That was the time when my reservedness was mistaken for intelligence. After all, I am the only child, the golden child, a gifted-and-talented baby whose only real talent was yearly honor roll and staying out of the way. I am the Renaissance woman whose daily life includes a four-hundred-year-old art form and a search history that typically ends with “vintage.” I’m both a thousand-year-old hag and a newborn baby. And up until now, I thought the hag was all there was to me. I assumed, like everyone else, that my wisdom came from this protective, all-knowing elder who told me about life’s horrors. Never did I question my numbness or the conflation of pessimism and clairvoyance. I had “finesse,” others might call dissociation, and I wheedled it, glaring down on my teenage peers for their teenage-ness, for I was mature. Above feeling. Above truth.
But this week has been full of childlike angst as years of avoidance finally caught up to me. My thoughts are static. I’m unable to eat, barely drinking water. Hot showers don’t coddle the way they used to. Short walks are breeding grounds for panic. A shuffling leaf is the limp foot of a stalker; a squirrel in the gutter is impending doom. And God forbid a rabbit shoot from the brush. Gone are the days of “aww, look at how white his tail is!” Instead, I’m left shaking like a Tennessee Williams heroine. I’m feeling what my peers allowed themselves to feel years ago, and it sucks.
“What’s wrong with me? I feel like I’m dying,” was another frequent prayer, and the answer was “you are, in a way.” No longer can you hold onto fear when the newness in you, light and endless, is starting to cry out. Her skin is thin, sensitive, but she wants to live, my God, she wants to live. And so, I’m wailing in the nebula as fresh wine between wineskins, as the dying hag and the growing babe who has to learn to live. Who has to maintain her sensitivity, which I believe is a gift, while living full out. There’s real danger in that, you know? To expose such preciousness, such love, to the cruelty of what stalks around us. That’s what the hag tried to warn me about. But it’s the only way. I tried to stay hidden, to shell myself off, but that plan was bound to fail. I must live, and to do that, I must give up the ghost.1
This is what I probably should have released before my last post, “Tick…Boom!” But anyway:
If you are experiencing something similar or have experienced this shedding or “ego-death” as some would call it, please let me know in the comments. I’m always looking for a little wisdom to get me through.
With love, Darby. 💞
Cover art: Gustave Moreau’s Lady Macbeth (1851)