Walking with ghosts
“I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I’ve ever existed at all.” ~ Paul Auster
Have you ever stopped to wonder if you are living your life? I mean, really, truly, actively participating in your life? Or are you half-heartedly watching from the sidelines, never fully present yet never completely gone either, going through the motions, present in body but not in mind? This is because you are in fact elsewhere, walking with ghosts.
It’s easy to tip the balance between living fully awake and living as though dead. It’s an unconscious occurrence that takes place before we’ve even realised it. One moment we’re here and the next, we’re gone. Varying degrees of trauma and addictions, challenging life circumstances, changes in relationships or family life, and pivotal milestones can serve as a trigger to plunge us into the other realm. And the problem is that because we’re not aware of this we think we’re here when we’re not. We’re on autopilot. The lights are on but nobody is home.
Does this sound familiar?
So how do we know when we are walking with ghosts? We’re apathetic and melancholic, sometimes indecisive and yet impulsive at others, we wonder around with a lack of joie de vivre, we find fault, we disagree, we’re angry, we’re resentful, and there’s always that something that we just can’t quite put our finger on. We live our lives as though there were a darkened filter on everything we see. This is what it means to live in the shadows.
When I was a child I had a recurring nightmare that I had all but forgotten about until recently. In this strange dream I would switch the lights on in various rooms in my house but they either wouldn’t turn on at all or would but be very low, as though someone had turned the dimmer switch right down, casting an eerie glow on everything around me. This murky low light was unsettling and no matter how I tried I couldn’t get the lights to turn on properly. I was left in darkness and it troubled me.
Most of my near on 43 years of life have been spent in the shadows of addiction. Living with an eating disorder is unpredictable and I swing from being fully alive to walking with ghosts. But I’ve spent so much time alternating between the two that I now know my ghosts by name, and the darkness can no longer unnerve me. And, more importantly, I know why they show up and what they’re here to teach me.
The path back to living a fully alive life takes a willingness to look in the dark places and to be OK with the sticky, murky stuff that we encounter. It’s a determination to be vulnerable and to show up differently, to speak our truth and be OK with the outcome. This takes courage and strength, but the price to pay for staying in the shadows will literally cost us a life lived fully alive.