The Haunting is Upon Us
Getting to the root of our social ills
Last time, I talked about how I’ve craved being a part of the writing community, but keep lone-wolfing anyway. This left me with some unresolved questions that I wanted to delve into a bit more… and as the drafts of this post evolved, it turned out these questions were related to larger issues that I’ve been trying to understand for years.
But let’s start with the question I had in mind when I first started this post: what, exactly, is preventing me from finding—and actually feeling—the belonging I crave?
Barriers to Belonging
I am Haunted
I’ll just re-state that I’m fortunate to feel a sense of belonging in most facets of my life—but my writing life has been the exception. And I think there’s a good reason for that.
I don’t hold back when I write; my heart is there beating on every page. Putting it out there to be dissected and judged is a very painful experience, one that I was not psychologically prepared for in the beginning. I didn’t know it would hurt that much, cause such a shock to my system. I didn’t know that I would feel so betrayed by slights that I would’ve seen as minor in other areas of my life. I didn’t recognize how deep my terror of being seen actually was until I tore out my heart and, with trembling hands, presented it to countless others who said, ew, no thanks, and turned away in disgust (or at least, that was how it felt).
Obviously, this opened a wound. But because I thought it was a stupid wound to have, I denied that I had it. After all, writers need to have a thick skin. I wasn’t allowed to be such a snowflake if I wanted to be a Real Writer. So I ignored the wound instead. I left it to fester.
And festering wounds can only lie dormant for so long before they start wreaking havoc.
While this wound didn’t change the way I write—there is so much power in a beating heart—it did change how I interacted with others in the writing and publishing world. The wound caused me to double down on protecting myself from rejection by isolating myself and expecting that no one was ever going to help me or be there for me. And you know what? In some ways it worked. The impenetrable force field I constructed around me prevented a lot of hurt. But it also made it harder to let the good things in.
Some say the nervous system has two modes: protect and connect. That certainly feels true based on what I’ve experienced: for a lot of my writing life I stayed in protection mode, hyper-alert to all the potential risks and not willing to let my guard down for even a second. But this state is incompatible with “connect” mode. Connection mode requires some lowering of the walls. They don’t have to lower all the way, and they don’t have to lower for just anybody, but it’s impossible to truly connect with someone unless you can get vulnerable—and the other person can too. Connection requires reciprocation, after all.
So, by keeping my walls up at all times, even the connections I eventually formed with some of my readers and other writers could never quite do it for me. I did appreciate them immensely, and they kept me afloat during various crises of faith, but my walls were so strong that although I could hear their words, I couldn’t feel their warmth. I just never found myself able to look around and say, I belong here.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. And that’s what led me to begin considering this experience as an example of a larger phenomenon, something that could be described as hauntedness.
Hauntedness, as I think of it, is a broad category that encompasses things like unaddressed festering wounds; unresolved individual, ancestral, and racial trauma; and unexpressed grief or rage or pain. I’m also not ruling out actual haunting by otherworldly forces! There's an important common thread here: a ghost within has unfinished business, and if you don’t heed the call to take care of it, it will eventually go all poltergeist on you.
We Are All Haunted
This doesn’t just happen on an individual level, either. It also applies on a larger scale. I live in the US, and constantly notice examples of how profoundly haunted our nation is. Our land is haunted. So is our history. Our bloodlines. Our institutions. All of this has continued to compound from generation to generation, because on the whole, we have consistently refused to take responsibility for dealing with the consequences of our behavior. It’s no wonder our modern culture is a dumpster fire! And, judging from the way things are going, it’s looking like our collective poltergeist is now upon us.
Compounding the problem even further: our culture constantly reinforces hauntedness by stripping away the practices humans developed over millennia to process, transform, and heal from the things that haunt us. Indeed, we actively shame people for doing these things. To list but a few examples:
“Making art is a frivolous waste of time.”
“Ugh, you’re so emotional. Will you please stop crying?”
“Did she just say hello TO A PLANT? What a psycho.”
“OMG, that person is so bad at singing/dancing. I’m so embarrassed for them.”
“Look at her, rocking back and forth like a crazy person.”
Additionally, by casting hauntedness (under the guise of trauma or mental illness) as a problem faced only by certain unfortunate individuals, we are able to avoid any responsibility for dealing with anything beyond our own selves, or even seeing the collective problem. These ghosts, man. They’re crafty!
Culturally, we are so deeply in protection mode—the only mode that feels safe to haunted people and societies—that we are stifling exactly what we need to break free and truly thrive.
So What Can We Do About It?
The way out, in my view, involves learning (or remembering) how to see our ghosts, work with them, and release them. Every released ghost makes our collective burden of hauntedness a little lighter, makes connection mode easier to access, and shows others what is possible. These same skills can directly translate to dealing with our collective hauntings, but there’s a key mindset shift needed to make this work effective: we must understand that separation between ourselves and other people—and nature as a whole—is a complete myth.
We are all entangled, our fates intertwined in small and large ways, our lives bound together like threads woven into fabric. Knowing this is what brings us back home. Remembering our interconnection, and letting it guide our actions, is essential for healing our hauntedness.
Often when we want to do something about an issue, the only option that seems available is to make different consumer choices. You know, like if we all just bought the right kind of lightbulb or made the right food choices, we’d be able to stave off the destruction of the earth. And yet here we are, despite plenty of individuals trying their best to be conscious consumers (and/or feeling extreme guilt and anxiety when we don’t have the time/economic privilege required to “do the right thing”).
That’s not to say that individual choices don’t matter. It’s just that, in my view at least, choosing to deal with our own hauntedness goes straight down to the root issue, and therefore has a much bigger impact than our consumer choices do. Releasing our ghosts helps us keep our focus on what really matters. Such as: connecting with the many beautiful beings we encounter every day. Finding inner liberation and bringing that out into the world so that we may all be free. Taking care of each other. Loving this short human existence as best we can.
It’s totally understandable why this isn’t the go-to solution, though. Inertia is a powerful force. It’s a lot easier to stick with the ghosts we know, even if they cause us pain, than to flip our comfortable-yet-confining worlds upside-down and go through the difficult work of shifting first our worldview, and then our actions. I know, because I’ve been there! And it was absolutely worth it, but I recognize that it’s hard to voluntarily take this on unless your inner poltergeist is raging and you have no other choice. Besides, it isn’t up to me to force anyone else to work on their stuff. Everyone is on their own journey and comes to this work in their own way, in their own time.
Knowing how real these hurdles are has made me unsure how to grapple with the “what can we do to get out of this mess???” question. But an anecdote my son told me one night pointed at a potential answer.
As we were cleaning up after dinner a few months ago, he told us that during lunch the other day, he’d suggested to some of his friends that they lock arms by holding tight to each other’s wrists, then spin in a circle together. So they went out to the field, and they ran in a circle as fast as they could go. And others saw how much fun they were having and wanted to join in. The circle grew that day to “probably about 20 people,” he said. But the real magic happened the next day. Word had gotten out, and this time about 50 people (in his estimation) came into the circle, and—he explained happily—these were people from groups that NEVER mixed. Middle school social hierarchies are intense! But for a few minutes at least, they were all linked together, spinning and laughing.
I think about this often. I know that as soon as the circle came apart everyone went their separate ways, back to their own rivalries and insecurities. But that doesn’t mean the moment wasn’t important. Because even for me, someone who wasn’t even there, it shifted something. How often do I tell myself that things cannot change? That the actions of one person are irrelevant? It’s so hard for me at times, especially since we all are faced with much evidence to the contrary every day, to believe that there is still hope. That changing something so pervasive as culture can even happen. But then I think of those middle schoolers in the grassy field, spinning in a giant circle, and I know.
This is what I want. For my community, for my country, for the world. To take you by the hand and say let’s spin. To laugh and scream and cry with you as we meet our ghosts and help them move on. To face each other in the aftermath and truly know that we are all in this together—and allow that to influence the way we interact with all who live within this beautiful, troubled world.