Ghosts of My Old Self

Ghosts of My Old Self

I’ve been haunted for as long as I can remember. Not by spirits or shadowed figures lurking in the night, but by versions of myself I’ve left behind.

They trail after me in quiet moments — when the house is silent, when I’m driving past familiar streets, when a song I haven’t heard in years finds its way to my ears. It’s then that I see them most clearly: the reckless teenager, the desperate twenty-something, the person who once loved someone so completely they forgot to love themselves. All of them still alive in fragments, even as I try to pretend I’ve moved on.

I meet my sixteen-year-old self in the mirror sometimes. She stares back at me with defiance and hunger. Her eyeliner too dark, her convictions too loud. She believed in escape — from the small town, the small life, the small expectations pressed like thumbprints onto her shoulders. She wrote bad poetry in spiral notebooks and thought she knew everything about the world because she’d read Kerouac once.

I remember the parties she shouldn’t have gone to, the people she trusted because she didn’t know better, the quiet phone calls she made to friends at 2AM, promising she was fine when she was anything but. I carry her stubbornness still, though I’ve sanded down the sharp edges. I want to tell her she won’t always feel like a raw nerve, that one day she’ll learn how to be alone without feeling lonely. But she wouldn’t believe me.

Then there’s the insecure twenty-two-year-old. I see her in old photographs, forced smiles and hopeful eyes. She thought the right job, the right person, the right zip code would finally make her feel like enough. She fell in love too fast and too hard, clinging to people like life rafts when the seas inside her got too rough.

I remember the way she changed herself to be loved — liked bands she didn’t care for, wore lipstick that didn’t suit her, laughed at jokes that made her stomach twist. She was terrified of silence, filling every moment with noise and company, afraid of what might bubble up if she sat still long enough.

I carry her tenderness still. She taught me how to love big, even when it wasn’t returned, how to throw your whole self into the world knowing you might get hurt. I want to tell her she deserves to take up space, that the people worth keeping won’t make her shrink to fit them. But she’d probably shake her head and say she’s fine.

And then — the person who once loved him. The man who was wrong in all the ways she pretended not to see. I meet her in places I wish I didn’t. In the way certain colognes make my throat tighten, in the pang of a familiar laugh, in the memory of a hand on my back leading me through a crowded room.

She believed in the impossible. In loving someone enough to change them. She swallowed apologies like bitter pills and built shrines out of maybes and what-ifs. She told herself she was lucky, that bruised hearts still beat, that half-love was better than none.

I carry her hope still. But now I know better.

These old selves are not mistakes to be erased or shamed. They are monuments to who I’ve been, to the roads I’ve walked to get here. They remind me that we are never just one thing. That people can hold multitudes — softness and fury, recklessness and wisdom, naivety and strength. And that shedding old versions of ourselves isn’t failure, it’s evolution.

I wonder who I’ll haunt one day. What pieces of the person I am now will linger in the years ahead. The quiet strength I’ve started to claim, the laughter lines etching slowly at the corners of my eyes, the way I’ve finally learned to enjoy my own company. I hope she remembers the kindness I’m trying to show myself now. I hope she thanks me for it.

We don’t talk enough about the ghosts we carry. The old selves we mourn or miss or wish we could resurrect for one more reckless night. But maybe we should. Maybe we owe it to ourselves to honor every version we’ve been — the messy, the beautiful, the ones we outgrew, and the ones we still haven’t quite let go.

Because they were all necessary. Every last one.

And though they haunt me sometimes, I’ve learned to let them. I’ve learned to nod at them in passing, to let them walk beside me for a while, before I keep moving forward.