The Ghost is Me

When I heard a song recently,

one line stayed with me

long after the music had ended.

The ghost is me

I couldn’t explain why.

It wasn’t the story the song was telling. 

It wasn’t even the lyrics that followed.

Just those four words.

They stayed.

We spend so much of our lives

wondering whether ghosts exist.

We imagine them as the people

we've lost, those we still love,

those we still miss, those we keep alive

by remembering them.

But what if there are other ghosts too?

Not only the people we've lost.

The people we've been.

There have been moments over

the past few years when I have

looked at my own life and felt

strangely unfamiliar within it. I

still got up, went to work,

cared for my family, answered emails,

made dinner. Nothing about my life

appeared unusual from the outside.

Yet sometimes I would catch

myself wondering,

Who is this woman?

Was it grief?

Was it motherhood?

Was it perimenopause?

Was it growing older?

Or was it simply that enough of life had changed that I no longer recognized the person who had emerged on the other side of it?

Sometimes I wonder what I am

grieving.

Is it the ghost of who I was?

Or the ghost of who I thought I would be?

Those are not the same woman.

One lived.

The other existed only

in the future I imagined.

Lately, though, another question

has been quietly making its way

into my thoughts.

Is it the ghost of who we were together?

That question feels different.

It makes me wonder if we

become ourselves a little

differently than I once believed.

We often think of identity as

something we discover within

ourselves. But perhaps some of

the most important versions of

who we are come into being

because they are witnessed

by someone else.

To know someone is to understand them.

To witness someone is to live alongside their becoming.

I wonder if that is one of the deepest expressions of love.

My parents still remember the

little girl I once was. They tell

stories I have long forgotten, and

somehow that child still feels

real because they remember her.

My son knows me only as his

mother. One day, he will

remember a version of me that

no one else ever will.

My closest friends remember

another woman entirely, the one

they laughed with decades ago,

before careers and marriages

and children quietly changed us all.

Each relationship has witnessed a different becoming.

And then I think about my

husband.

He didn't simply know me.

He witnessed me becoming his

wife.

He witnessed me becoming a

mother.

He witnessed the ordinary life we

built together, the routines,

the conversations, the private jokes,

the disappointments, the dreams

that belonged only to us.

There was a version of me that

existed only because we shared

that life.

When he died, I didn't only lose

him.

I lost the one person who was

still witnessing that version of

me.

Perhaps that shared self did not

disappear.

It simply has nowhere left to

continue becoming.

Maybe that is why the lyric has

stayed with me.

The ghost is me.

Not because I have disappeared.

But because there are versions

of ourselves that can only exist

within certain relationships.

When those relationships change,

those selves do not vanish.

They become quieter.

Harder to find.

Held now only in memory.

We often say we keep the people

we've loved alive by

remembering them.

Perhaps something similar is

true of ourselves.

Perhaps every person who has

loved us carries a different

version of who we have been.

Some are still here to remind us.

Some are gone.

None of us carries the whole

story alone.

The people who love us each

remember a different chapter.

They remember us differently

because they witnessed us

differently.

And perhaps that is one of the

quietest gifts of love.

Not simply that someone knows

us.

But that they have walked beside

us long enough to see us

become.

When we are young, we spend

so much of our lives trying to

become someone. We imagine

that one day we will arrive, that

there is a finished version of

ourselves waiting somewhere

ahead.

Life has taught me otherwise.

Becoming never ends.

It simply changes direction.

Sometimes we become because

someone enters our lives.

Sometimes we become because

someone leaves them.

Sometimes we become because

life changes us without asking

our permission.

And sometimes we only

recognize those changes when

we realize we have become

someone our younger selves

could never have imagined.

Perhaps that is why transitions

can feel so disorienting.

They ask us to say goodbye to

versions of ourselves that were

real.

They ask us to grieve versions of

ourselves that never had the

chance to be.

And every now and then, they

leave us quietly wondering

whether the ghost is the person

we've lost...

or the person we were together.

I don't know the answer.

I only know that the older I

become, the less I believe we

write our lives alone.

Perhaps becoming never ends

because the story is never

written by just one of us.

-- Anne TM Konkle, PhD