Are you ghosting your life?

If you’ve dated sometime in the digital age, you probably have been ghosted or ghosted somebody.  It’s not a new concept at all – just a new term for doing a disappearing act, ignoring someone, not having enough courage to say, ‘Hey, I’m just not into you’ or the old break up line ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’  Abba knew all about it when they sang ‘Ring, ring, why don’t you give me a call?’  The final verse starts with ‘You were here and now you’re gone, Hey did I do something wrong?’

The ghosted is left wondering what went wrong. Only the ghost knows and it’s unlikely that he or she is going to come back to tell you. No point wasting time chasing a ghost.  Texts vaporise into thin air the moment they are sent. Questions remain unanswered. It’s not a good feeling, but it happens. And then it’s time to lift your shoulders, hold your head up and move on. No point allowing a ghost to continue haunting you.  

But what if you have been ghosting your own life?

Okay,  maybe not all of your life. Maybe not your job, your commitments and obligations – the stuff you have to show up for.  What if you’ve been ghosting the stuff that’s important to you – your passion, your dreams, your wellbeing, your self?  What if you’ve been taking so much care of other people’s needs, too much time people pleasing, that you’ve forgotten about you?

Yesterday morning while I was doing the scribing part of my Miracle Morning, I had a lightbulb moment and realised I’ve been doing exactly that. I’d ghosted my creativity, my writing, I’d ghosted Cindy.

I’d been keeping myself so busy with trivia and drag bingo and managing a writing competition, with trying to get back into a gym routine, with the day job, with organising a social event for singles, with Netflix bingeing, with stuffing my face full of chocolate  😦 and with grieving, that I had completely neglected my current manuscript.

I’ve been re-reading Page after Page by Heather Sellers. In Chapter 3 “Lover on the Side, Lover in the Center’, she writes about making your writing your lover, giving your writing the same commitment and devotion that you would give to your lover.

“To create a writing life, you will need to fall in love – deeply, seductively, passionately – with your writing life. It will become not a habit or a job, but a lover. If you keep it a second-string lover, your back-up lover, your Tuesday night sex-as-friends kind of lover, it might always be cranky with you. But if you make your writing life so lovely you can’t take your eyes off it, you will space out during meetings, and dream about it as you go through the day, just like when you’re in love.”

This Easter break, I will be making my writing life my lover. I will devote hours to Cindy and Edward, Henry and Snow, until they are my world again and always popping in my mind, until I can’t wait to spend devoted, quality time with them. I will work out a way to make them central every day until I complete their story, even when I have to do other stuff. 

Cindy chose me to tell her story and Edward’s story and I have to honour that and nurture that so that she stays and doesn’t find some other writer to appreciate her more.

So Cindy doesn’t ghost me.

I will no longer ghost my characters, their story, my writing or my life.

So my question to you: what have you been ghosting? And what are you going to do about it?