No More Ghosts

No More Ghosts

John Paul Derryberry

It's 2023, and this blog turned ten at some point over the summer. After ten years of sharing my thoughts, emotions, life, family, and friends in this space, I have sometimes repeated myself or contradicted myself. I attempt not to, but it's part of the cost of the commitment to writing a weekly blog. The reality is you talk as much as I do, you’re going to communicate some things that are polar opposites.

Yet, I'm not surprised by this realization because when I started writing as a coping skill over 20 years ago, I started writing my experience with grief and mental health and called it, Defending A Ghost. That name I knew was a nod to my inability to move forward. I was literally defending ghosts, a life I could not have, but wished I did. I spent so much time wishing my dad and my friend was alive that I screwed up a lot. Grief and your mental health can convince you that our most selfish thoughts are true, and you have to project that onto everyone and every situation.

At some point, I wrote a blog called, Chasing Ghosts, about how we chase particular lives we wish we could have but missed out on for numerous reasons. This was rooted in my work as a social worker and seeing clients struggle to understand the hand they were dealt in life. And, how the use of drugs, alcohol, and manipulating people was a means to avoid the emotional holes we have in ourselves. I have chased those ghosts; we all have. It’s rather hard because chasing those ghosts is easier than admitting we are the problem. It was an evolution for me or anyone for that matter to move beyond our mess. It’s scary thing to do, but also a brave, exciting, and freeing act. Once I stopped chasing, I realized I want to move toward helping others chase what wasn’t real. It was better than being in my 40s and blaming others for my short comings.

We should grow, evolve, and adjust our beliefs as we gain experiences with people we have known forever and with people we have met along our journey. Live life correctly, and it's less and less about our ghosts and more about the people we see in front of us; even with their flaws, we see them as distinct people, with good and bad character traits, who are doing the best they can. Living in the world of ghosts, we tend to see only from our point of view, and no one exists from just our point of view. We tend to see the world how we feel it should be, how we selfishly want it to be, instead of how it is.

The problem with this type of navigation of life is that, as life passes, we have to perform emotinal circus acts to keep our selfish view in focus. Leaving anyone attempting this emotionally all knotted up. We need to remember to live among the people and the give and take of live and love. We are all imperfect. Yet many of us chase a perceived life that we think will provide the most happiness for ourselves. But it never works that way, selfishness leaves so much out. So we are left empty and lashing out. I know it all too well, as I lived and chased that false reality for a long time. It wasn't until I stopped defending and chasing ghosts, that I finally got to know the person I needed to know: myself. That's where healing and growth starts. Where that growth ends no one can predict, but the not knowing is exciting. I'll spend the next ten years or more trying to communicate that to my audience, big or small. Because the other side of ghosts is real people, real life, and oh boy, it is beautiful to be fully engaged with something alive especially when it doesn’t exactly go the way we want. Life would be awful boring any other way.