Ghosted
Processing the loss of friends through a comic of sorts about ghosts.
It’s a beautiful thing, to have a friend who feels safe, who understands you, and with who you can be yourself in a way you can’t with most others. I had a few friends that were this for me over the years.
Everyone needs a friend like that, or several, people you can be authentically yourself around and people you don’t have to wear a mask for. As a neurodivergent person, it can feel crucial to have these people in my life, and also very hard to come by.
So when that friend and confidante ghosts you it can feel…heartbreaking, like losing a part of yourself.
Maybe this is a platonic heartbreak, but it can feel like a breakup in some ways. Looking back on memories of the friendship you might wonder if it had always been doomed to end, if the other person had been sincere, or if something changed along the way. Though there were no romantic feelings you truly loved these friends who left your life without a goodbye.
I’ve had plenty of friendships in which we’ve both drifted apart over the years, but the close friends who just disappear, the close friend who one day stops answering back, don’t pick up your calls or even read your texts…that hurts more and it’s those friendships that still haunt me.
This person you shared so much of your true self with, unmasked and authentic, vanished yet their ghost still seems to linger. You don’t know if they think about you, but you might often find yourself thinking of them. You might wish you could share something with this friend you once had, or wonder what you would say to them if you ever saw them again.
You wonder how it was so easy to leave your friendship behind, you behind, and why it is so hard for you to let the friendship go. You probably gave a lot to these friends, you might’ve been there for them in hard times and through big life changes for you both. You invested time, emotional energy, and care that you thought they would gladly return if needed. Sadly, in the end, they weren’t there for you like you were for them, they weren’t there for you when you needed them.
With these ghosts haunting me I used to think it was me, that something inherent in me made me easy to leave and forget. Maybe being my whole self around them was the problem, I had been too much. Even though I tried to compensate for my “too muchness” by carrying a lot for them, maybe it wasn’t enough.
Now I realize it’s not me, at least not completely, there is something about them that made them give up the ghost. Something that made it hard for them not to float away.
In a world of social media, these ghosts may even haunt you digitally where they seem to be thriving in their afterlife of your friendship. A small part of you knows though, you know that the well-curated feed is a part of the ghost, it is see-through and ephemeral.
One of the hardest things for me with these friendships is that I might never get closure, I might never know why they disappeared, not fully. Maybe even harder is that I still care, I wish I could know if they were doing alright. I wish I could tell them it hurt when they left but I’m doing okay without them.
Maybe these ghosts will always haunt you, knowing they are out there living their afterlife and you’re just left with their ghost.
Stay curious,
