All of the Thoughts I've Ghosted Stand There In the Room.

🎶 I should not be left to my own devices; it comes with a Substack crisis essay 🎶

There are some things you don’t want to share for Internet consumption.

For me, it’s all my half baked harvest thoughts — the thoughts that are not quite formed. Thoughts that could be real good if I dove into them, but require a lot of work to get that real good ending.

So instead, I just ghost them.

A thought flits into my head and I actively think, “I do not want to give you the deeper thought and consideration you deserve.”

And maybe this is true for you too. Must be exhausting always ghosting your own thoughts! How about we do this - we sit down, set a timer for a cool fifteen minutes, and start writing down the thoughts you’re ghosting. I’ll go first.

• I find myself constantly in consume mode. I hate it. I want to be creating. Why am I not doing that?

• I opened up the deactivate setting on all my social media profiles, looked at all of them for three minutes, and then quickly closed out of those tabs.

• Who are the judges of the voice right now? Like, who are these people with Keith Urban on this TikTok? (I gave time, space, and research to this thought. It’s not the American Voice. Carry on.)

• I used to be a yes person — give me something and I can figure out how to make it work. Tell me I can’t do something and I’ll say “Yes, please, I will do it.” Now, I’m often struck by how quickly I find ways and reasons for something to not work. I want to get back to an enthusiastic “yes”, instead of writing an ending before a beginning.

• Speaking of beginnings: I hate being a beginner. I resent myself the whole way through beginnings, instead of learning how to be good at it.

• More and more, I find myself saying out loud, “I’m more interesting than this” when I’m in a social media spiral. Or when I sleep in. It’s sometimes working.

• “Supercut” by Lorde makes me want to run down a hall, like one of those Lizzie McAlpine “Ceilings” TikToks.

• February had all this good and it was still hard. That’s super annoying. I hate that things like this continue to be true.

• All year, I’ve thought something - anything - would be the magical fix to my routines. Like I would wake up one day and things would be different. It doesn’t work like that, apparently.

• I need stricter boundaries to make things happen. I’m pretending that’s not true. I can be gentle with myself mentally, but I need concrete scaffolding to make things happen and quite honestly, to take care of myself. (Can that be a thing? I should ask Dave.) I want this to not be true; I know deep down, it is.

• I like 6 AM workout classes! And I worked a job where that wasn’t possible to do for a long time, and I spent so long talking myself out of liking them. (TBH, still am.) I love starting my morning this way! I’m not doing anything else anyways.

• I have to make the stakes so ridiculously high right now to get out of bed by a certain time.

• I love listening to whole albums right now and I wonder what that says about me.

• Time feels like water right now — I never have any concept of what day it is, even when I’m writing it down.

• I’ve started a couch crying playlist. I will not be providing further commentary.

• Making one decision & doing some small things to make you excited about that decision — I’m starting to think that’s always worth it.

• Every once in a while, I get so deeply nostalgic for past seasons of life. Living in a downtown city and having an abundance of choices of places to walk to. The reading season I was in during the spring of 2019. Or nostalgic for past hair styles! (I managed to have incredible bangs once in my life and I’ve chased that high ever since.) But I’ve also found there are a lot of little and big things I can do to bring back the feelings of those seasons. Spending time walking in the downtown I live in. Spending time reading physical books instead of working towards other hobbies or reading only on my e-reader. This is a reminder to keep doing those little and bit things when the nostalgia feels so big it could take your breath away.

• I’m writing this essay, sitting in a cafe with big windows that face out onto the street. I’m watching cars go by and participating in my favourite Alberta past time: guessing how long people have lived in the province based on how they’re dressing for the 14 degree weather. The booths are leather; my coffee cup has cattle on it; there’s vinyl on the stereo and six people total in the cafe. Shauna Niequist wrote an essay recently on her best writing advice, and she shared that you should write vivid glimpses of your days down. I think I spend a lot of my time trying to remove myself from…well, myself. From my feelings, from noticing, from being. I should make a list of what “being” feels like for me — what it would be like to be not removed. I think it feels like a glimpses practice.

And that’s it. So what thoughts have you been ghosting? And can you do anything about them?