Ghosts

Everyone loves ghosts. I’m not talking about the ectoplasmic spooky kind either. Ghosts, phantoms, or more specifically, projections is what I'm referring to. When we love someone, it's possible we don't actually love "them". We love the "ghost" of them, the projection that we've superimposed over the true version of that person. This ghost represents all the best qualities of that person. The ghost is kind, thoughtful, determined, brave, ambitious, outgoing, and dedicated. The ghost remembers your favorite foods, buys the most thoughtful gifts, listens to all your problems. The ghost is amazing. Unfortunately, and paradoxically, the ghost never changes. Whereas the true person beneath the surface, is constantly changing.

First impressions last a lifetime, but often, that first impression is of a projection that a person put forth to mask the truth of their nature. How many of us are closest to the truth of ourselves when we first meet people? How many of us lead with our negative qualities? How many of us start a conversation with a new person by telling them our insecurities and short comings? It's much more likely that we embellish the truth to come across as more impressive. How many of us put into a dating profile that we're looking for adventure, when the most adventure we actually take part in is searching the jungles of Netflix? How many of us believe the strangers that tell us how adventurous they are? How many of us then take that first impression, and carry it for the rest of our lives? This is where the ghosts are born. This is where the trap gets set.

Often, the other person isn't setting that trap though. It's usually a trap of our own design, a trap we unknowingly set for ourselves. More often than not, the other person is desperately trying to tell you who they are, but you can’t see it. Even if they don’t mean to show you, even If they aren’t verbally telling you, they’re showing you with their actions. No matter how deeply you feel you know someone, it’s possible you’re projecting onto them qualities that they either don’t actually demonstrate or they don’t believe about themselves. This is easiest to see in our failed relationships. We believed our partner to be a certain way, but at the end of it all, it turns out we were wrong. How many of us have been blinded by love? How many times have we failed to see a person’s true character because we clung to the idea of who we believed them to be?

This doesn’t just happen in romantic relationships though, it can happen with anyone in your life that you have impressions of. It’s not always a positive ghost either. You could easily put a ghost on someone you dislike. You could attribute all sorts of negative qualities to a person that aren’t true, but you believe them to be true because of your personal feelings about them. There’s a person in my personal life that I can’t stand, but at the end of the day, I realize that I actually barely know him. I placed a projection onto him, based on little information, and it’s very possible that my ideas of him aren’t true at all. In our minds we create a ghost of every person we meet. Our first impressions build characters that only exists to us, and those characters are never fully developed.

This isn’t an easy problem to solve. Most of us don’t even think about the fact that we do it in the first place. There is a solution though, we have to learn to step outside of ourselves. To stop conjuring up these projections, these ghosts in our minds, we have to be empathetic. The only way to combat the false narratives we create is to discover the truth of someone. The only way to discover someone else’s truth is to be deeply empathetic. This is easier said than done. Most of us don’t actually practice empathy. Most of us can’t fully put ourselves in another person’s shoes. Most of us can’t imagine being the other person as the child, the teen, and the person they are today. That’s the only way to really understand someone else though, you need to understand their whole story, not just the most recent entry in their journal. That’s the only way to dispel all the ghosts we create. That the only way to witness the truth of the full fledged human beneath the projection.