When we refer to ghosts – whether you believe in them or not – there’s a certain understanding that they have lost their free will. The idea of a cognizant spirit with agency that can interact with our world has intrigued ghost hunters and spiritualists for ages. Most ghosts of myth and lore are portrayed as an energy echo doomed to repeat a moment in time forever. The Lady in White that haunts the tower where she died, roaming the rooms and walking through walls where doorways used to be is found in many places with long remembered histories. The lack of agency and the emotional imprint of that moment in time is key to their remaining behind for centuries.

There’s another kind of ghost. We refer to people who have lost their j’oie de vivre – their enjoyment and engagement with life – as ‘ghosts of their former selves’. The pensioner that has lost their spouse of 50 years or the young mother holding her child at her spouse’s funeral fade for a while after their loss, sometimes they never find their way back. Abuse survivors might spend their days being as unobtrusive as possible. When their dreams are wielded against them as weapons and their hopes are turned into cruel waiting games they hide them. No one can hurt a dream if they don’t know about it. With time though, the survivor had to bury those possible futures deeper and deeper until even they didn’t know where, or what, they were.

Once people fade the people around them cease to remember who they were before they faded. They take the blank canvas of loss and proceed to paint on it, not as who the person was before they became a ghost, nor who they are today, but as the world assumes they should be. The young woman becomes the ‘grieving widow’. Forever defined by a moment in time and by an event that she will wear until she can find a new role. The survivors of abuse are often overlooked because abuse is rarely public. We don’t hold funerals for a relationship even when one of the partners chose to commit emotional violence that made their partner a ghost of their former self. One or both members of the relationship walk away faded and torn, yet their peers forget who they were before. They label the ghost with the name of the person still hiding who they are inside. They’ve decided for that familiar revenant that that is how they shall remain.

I’ve been a ghost fora while. I gave up lifelong hopes and dreams decades ago. There were seemingly good reasons at the time. It was survival after all and so I did what was needed. But I found that with time I couldn’t remember the dreams and I didn’t care until someone asked me what mine were. I hated that question and therefore avoided it. I didn’t let myself think about any of it because the fires of the rage inside me couldn’t come out. The people around me had had no part in the kindling of that anger and did not deserve the pain. There was never a time, a therapist, or a place where that anger could be let go. So it stayed, but to keep it quiet I had to forget what I was angry about. Choices became difficult. I didn’t know what I liked or wanted. People would ask me ‘What would you like for Christmas” or for my birthday and I would echo what so many women that came before me said. Each of them were survivors of abuse and each of them went silent. But they would always answer ‘oh nothing. I don’t know. I don’t need anything’ because they couldn’t face their loss. This way of coping might work for a lifetime unless you find freedom and make it to a place of safety. Then it begins to fail.

If someone around you always says they don’t need or want anything, don’t push or get angry. As far as they know they have no needs to tell you. When a person’s grief just fades don’t believe they’ve healed simply because you no longer hear their cries. They stopped crying when the world decided they had cried enough. And when a friend or loved one starts drifting instead of rowing in life find out why. Personalities don’t just fade away sometimes they were terrorized into hiding and need someone to notice they went missing. I still have no dreams beyond finding a way to help people. The dreams I had before I met the one who tore me down were mostly fulfilled by then. I didn’t realize until today that I was a ghost. But it explains why so many never see me and paint what they expect to see in my place. I somehow never look like whatever they think someone who has lived my life should look like.

What I have learned from this though is that if we let one dream be slain in the name of the greater good there will be more that fall after it. Protect your dreams for they are your children. They are the spirit of your future and sustenance for your hopes. If you have survived abuse, or the terror of trauma, you don’t have to be a ghost forever. We can find ourselves again because even if others can’t see us, we never went away. Be safe, remember that you are worthy of love and so are your hopes and dreams.