Why are you arguing with ghosts?

Why are you arguing with ghosts?

Stop holding the door open for conversations that you’re having with who you thought they were.

Helen Higgins

Oct 28, 2026

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“One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted— / One need not be a House—”

Emily Dickinson

Why are you arguing with ghosts?

I’m not talking about the dead, exactly. Instead, I’m referring to the living people who’ve become unreachable in the shape we remember them.

You know the argument. It begins whilst you’re washing up, driving home, or staring at the ceiling at 1.17 a.m. You compose the message you’ll never send, explaining precisely how they hurt you in a way that will devastate them. In this imaginary version, they listen. They finally understand. They want your forgiveness. You say what you should’ve said at the time, and they become, for one brief moment, the person you needed them to be.

Then real life returns, and you remember: that person may never have existed.

That’s the grief of discovering that someone you cared about wasn’t quite who you thought they were. They were warm in certain moments, sure, and they were perceptive enough to make you feel astonishingly seen in that moment or two that stand out. You didn’t invent those moments, and they’re not figments of your imagination

—

although I understand it can be tempting to question yourself about them in that way. Instead, you could have mistaken them as evidence of a deeper person underneath. We’re all capable of making that mistake.

I believe that we build people from fragments. It’s easy. There’s a conversation that becomes a promise, and the flash of tenderness becomes a character reference. There’s having similar interests, and the recognition of the same worldview. Sometimes, there’s even a shared history. Silence is almost explained away because the alternative would mean revising the whole story, and we make a home out of what someone might be, then wonder why we feel homeless when they keep showing us who they are.

Fitzgerald understood the seduction of an imagined person. Gatsby's green light means more to him than Daisy herself. It holds the future he’s built around her, and it’s a future that no real person could ever quite fulfil. We do something similar when we attach ourselves to someone's potential. We long for the life that seems possible beside them, rather than seeing the person who’s actually there.

So, we argue with ghosts.

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We replay old messages looking for proof that we mattered, and we rehearse explanations for people who have shown little appetite for understanding us or the situations we think we’re in. We imagine the apology that would make the past fall neatly into place. Sometimes, we’re not even trying to get them to come back to us. Sometimes, we just want them to acknowledge what happened, to confirm that we didn’t imagine the connection, and that our hurt isn’t ridiculous simply because separate ways were decided upon, voluntarily or otherwise.

Emily Dickinson knew that a haunting doesn’t require a haunted house because the mind has corridors of its own. Memory makes a room of one stray remark and furnishes it with every hope we were too frightened to name. We return because the scene is unfinished. Our brains don’t like to leave things unfinished, so we believe that if we find the right words, the ending might change.

I studied Carol Ann Duffy's ‘Havisham’ when I was fifteen, and I remember feeling an unexpected compassion for her in English class. I understand that compassion differently now, though. There’s something frightening about watching a person become so entangled in an old hurt that the hurt starts to feel like the only thing left of what they loved. Duffy gives us a woman trapped inside the wreckage of a love story, her longing and rage tangled together. When we can’t reconcile what we wanted with what happened, we might find solace in starting to live inside the injury. By keeping the wound open, we’re allowing ourselves to perpetuate the fear that closing it feels like agreeing that the loss was real.

Letting go of the ghost doesn’t require us to declare that everything was false.

Your feelings were real; I sometimes think that’s why the grief is difficult to explain, though. There probably wasn’t a formal ending, and there was a lack of shared definition of what you were. No one can point to an object and say, “That is what you lost.” You’re grieving a possibility, and possibilities don’t leave evidence of a life you pictured living.

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The work isn’t to find the perfect final speech. I can rehearse what I want to say as many times as I want to, but it won’t change anything. The work is to stop making peace dependent on someone who’ll never understand. We can recognise the limits of their care without being ashamed of having cared. Being cared for is a kindness many people would beg to experience. Don’t apologise for caring. You’re allowed to miss what you hoped they were and still believe what their actions have shown you.

So, I’ll ask you again: why are you arguing with ghosts?

Is it because some part of you is still waiting for the person you believed in to return and explain why they never became the person you needed?

You don’t have to keep holding a conversation open for someone who isn’t coming through the door. You’re allowed to leave without their agreement. You’re allowed to stop presenting your hurt as a case they’re finally going to judge fairly. You’re allowed to have the last word instead of them.

You can grieve the person you imagined.

You can be grateful for what they revealed about what you want: the relief of being met with tenderness and understanding.

We can stop confusing the hope with the evidence.

The ghost can remain part of the story without haunting the rest of it.

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