I Wrote a Letter to My Ghost

And no, I don't mean Casper

Let’s set the stage. Because if we’re going to talk about ghosting, we have to talk about avoidance first.

The first memories I have of true, body locking avoidance hit me in college. Not just procrastination, I am talking about the kind of debilitating paralysis where you literally cannot move forward. I was a master self saboteur. As successful as I am today, man, I struggled. I had anxiety just walking into a studio art class to the point of skipping it, dropping classes, and dragging out college way longer than it should have taken.

What I have unpacked now is that part of it came from doing life alone. Yes, ultimately you are responsible for your own follow throughs. But not having a support system in those defining years made it tougher to commit. There was no anchor, no one nudging me forward when I froze. And when no one is there to hold the line with you, slipping into avoidance becomes the easy path. Recognizing that pattern is exactly how I started breaking it.

Now in therapy, I have come to accept that I procrastinate. But hey, I am project based. Always have been in my adult professional life. And honestly? It has served me fucking well. Like, so well that now I own it. I ebb and flow. I know when to lock in and pull long hours, and I know when to step back. The first part is awareness, right? Then you lean the fuck in… accept it and get to work.

If you are reading this thinking, Nah, this does not apply to me… yeah, it probably does if you’re thinking just that.

So lock in, cowboy. Time for the rodeo.

I am sure there were plenty of examples of avoidance in childhood too, but I have conveniently or maybe mercifully erased those. My memory of earlier years is patchy at best, like someone ripped whole chapters out of the book. Trauma has a way of doing that.

Sometimes I look back at photos from my early twenties, me wandering through Europe, smiling in the middle of a festival field, blurry late night bus rides, and I do not remember a single snapshot. Not the taste of the food, not how jet lagged I was, not even the good times. Little did I know I was actually dancing with suppression.

Warped Tour 1999 filling my time on tour with henna and getting paid.

What I do know is this: our nervous systems are sneaky. They will fight, they will flee, and sometimes they will just switch the lights off completely. Avoidance is its own kind of survival tactic.

So it goes something like this… I write fast, sloppy, shorthand in my journals. And while I am not going to unload my private five page diatribe to my ghost, here is the gist of it:

Dear Ghost:

Who hurt you?
Who hurt you so badly that you thought it was normal to hurt me?

That’s the real question. What I’ve come to see is this: when someone never heals their own wounds, they don’t keep them contained. They hand them off.

Avoidance isn’t strength. It’s unfinished business.

It leaks into every connection that comes after. The closeness they’re afraid of, they withhold from you. The pain they’ve been carrying, they unload as silence, distance, disappearance. I know because I’ve been there.

Avoidance happens when intimacy or bonding or growth gets cut off too young. It could be so many moments…parental neglect, a household that does not hold space for your own emotional safety, a family splitting up, a critical role model. When the ground never felt steady, closeness starts to feel dangerous instead of safe. And if you love someone like that, you don’t just deal with them you’re also dealing with every ghost of the people who hurt them first.

So your avoidance becomes your protection.

For me, I trace it back to losing my dad so young. At six years old, your brain cannot process a rupture like that. You do not make sense of it, you just protect yourself. You build walls, you disappear into being the good kid, you shrink your world so it cannot fall apart again. My nervous system wrote a rule book: if I do not get too close, nothing can leave. If I do not finish, it cannot be judged. If I vanish first, I cannot be abandoned. You can’t hurt me if I can hurt you first.

That was my blueprint for survival. That explains my why.

And then it hit me while writing my latest letter. FUCK. This was STILL an unhealed part of myself that needed to surface, move through, and say bye bye Felicia to. My avoidance, which I have moved mountains to grind down into fragments, resurfaced. It was not to wreck me, but to remind me there was still more to move through.

Oh god. And still, listening to myself even today while writing this substack, I knew this already. That is the thing about self work. The activations never fully go away. But you learn how to manage them. How to not be so reactive, but to honor them and move through them. And I could not be more proud of you and me for doing it.

The Basics

In relationships
• The thing you still need to move through will show up for you to heal. It is yours alone. Accept it. Release it. It sucks but you’ll literally be like…oh, boy! here we go again! Time to burn this up for good.
• When they show up avoidant, what they do about it is on them. It is not yours to fix, soothe, or explain away just to keep the union intact.

How to do it differently this time
• Remember the two points above. When your anxiety spikes, do not engage. Choose you.
• Most people with avoidant partners lean into anxious attachment and scramble to fix. This is the moment you do not fix.
• If an avoidant wants to come to you, let them. It is not your job to lure them in.

If you need a 101
Start with Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel S. F. Heller, one of my top five relationship books.

So here’s the thing. Face this for you. Write the letter, name the ghost, call out the pattern. Whatever it takes. Not for the person who ghosted you, not for the version of yourself that kept looping the same story, not for the life you thought you were supposed to live. For you. For your ghost. Hell, give her a name if it helps.

If you need a reminder, a cheat sheet, or a place to come back when the anxiety hits, start here. Reread this. Highlight the lines that feel like truth. Write it out on a post-it. Take a screen shot. Tell your girlfriends to remind you…Whatever you do, remember this: you come first.

Because at the end of the day, the work is not about them. It is not about fixing, chasing, or proving. It is about choosing yourself every single time.

Let’s finish the job.

XX- Jen