Learning to Let Go of What I Didn't Know I Was Holding Onto
Sometimes we summon the ghosts of our past without realizing it. This is how I'm learning to let go.
The ghost of my past
“You’re so selfish,” the ghost of my past replayed — cracking the armor I spent years fortifying from therapy and every goddamn self-help content.
“Woe is me, you just want people to feel sorry for you,” she said, her voice vibrating against my eardrum. It felt so real, I almost turned around. It was the same whisper I’d hear everywhere — every moment I tried to move on with my life.
What if she’s right?
No matter how much I sacrificed my heart and soul to give to others, I always came back to those cyclical words that drained me and left me guilt-ridden. Guilt for not volunteering more despite doing it every year for 15 years. Guilt for not being patient enough despite paying for literally everything in a past relationship.
The ghost of my past follows me into my sleep. There she is again, walking away from me. “I see right through all your bullshit!” I’m shrieking into a void, desperate for a reaction. She’s silent. I’m invisible to her again — just like when I was a child.
In another dream, I try to leave the home we once shared. But she’s everywhere I turn — expressionless, silent. Even in that dead silence, I’m panicking, breathless, climbing over walls. I don’t scream. Any cry for help became proof against me — selfish, dramatic, just wanting pity. So I learned to be silent. To stay trapped.
I don’t even know why she’s chasing me. She never wanted me. But she wouldn’t let me go. That was the tether — not love, just grip.
After all the work I had done to “let go,” here I was waking up in a sweat from my inescapable nightmare. Even on a sunny day, mid-run, feeling strong — she’d creep up again to suffocate me with self-doubt. She’d siphon my soul out of me until I was hollow enough for her comfort.
She couldn’t control me anymore. She couldn’t make me small like she used to. Yet I was tethered to her, a ghost of my past who never left.
The past of my ghost
The tether was first formed in my childhood days when I would choke from my fear of asking for basic needs. One of those times was when I asked for a toothbrush despite having already waited until the bristles had bent and frayed.
“Yes…” she let out along with her exasperated sigh and belittling tone. My heart sank — the whole family heard.
“I shouldn’t have bothered her,” I thought. “What a stupid time to ask when she’s driving,” I criticized myself.
After that humiliating car ride, I’d strategize when other moments would be more fitting, yet no matter when or where I asked, it was the same pattern or condescending text, “K…”
When I’d see her happily support her children with items like new soccer shoes, eighty times the price of a toothbrush that she could have gotten at the 99-cent store, I’d realize that no matter what needs I had, they would always be too costly.
But it was never about the money, was it? I wasn’t worth the unconditional familial love. After all, I was an outsider living in a home of strangers. I was lucky that they saved me from the orphanage. I was indebted to accepting whatever treatment I got.
Every time I surfaced my observations that I didn’t feel like a part of the family and felt more like a burden, I was reminded that this was due to me being selfish and ungrateful for making such claims. I was gasping for the truth, but I didn’t know what was real anymore. I was drowning in my own fear and self-doubt that would fill my lungs until I lost my voice. I learned to suffocate myself before anyone else could.
Maybe I’m selfish and just seeing things.
And so I was conditioned to believe that my needs were unreasonable and that I couldn’t trust my perception of reality. And if I couldn’t trust mine, then I’d prioritize someone else’s.
I thought leaving home and never looking back would give me the air and freedom that I had never had. Yet even in adulthood, having rest periods where I didn’t volunteer and serve others felt like proof that I was selfish. Asking my ex-boyfriend to get a full-time job after I’d carried the financial weight for years — even through my own unemployment — felt terrifying.
Summoning the ghost without realizing it
By 30, I had accomplished everything I’d set out for myself — business ventures, patents, a Master’s from Berkeley, jobs at household names in tech, close friendships across the country, dream cities. These were signs that I had moved on from my ghost, right? What more could I have done to let go?
Feeling like I was on top of the world, I’d share my accomplishments on social media. Yet I’d feel empty. I’d find myself checking who liked my post, hoping I’d find her there. She never noticed. Never a simple congratulations. What fucking breadcrumbs I was hoping for from the woman who raised me.
Every time I searched but didn’t find her, I’d feel a yank on my neck. In the heat of rage, I’d trace the source of the tether, expecting to find her holding the other end.
But instead, on the other end was my own hand — gripping a lit candle, slowly setting the tether on fire. I was burning myself to make light for others. I was the one summoning her. A séance I held in my own mind, calling the dead back just to feel connected to familiar pain. To hear her whispers. To feel her voice.
I wasn’t tethered to her. I was tethered to the need for her. The need for her to love me like I was her own daughter. To finally see me. To see that I had become my own hero.
Everything I ever did, all of my volunteer work, was because I never wanted anyone to feel forgotten as I did. I saw myself in every person I served — the invisible, the ones nobody stood up for. My giving was real. My care was honest. But underneath it was a girl still trying to prove she wasn’t selfish. Still hoping that if she gave enough, the ghost would finally disappear.
She never did.
I wanted her to acknowledge my dreams, yet she was the one who brought them to life. Pain was the fuel.
The more I thought of her, the more I remembered what it felt like to be forgotten — and the fiercer my love became for the people I served. The more pain I felt, the thicker the tether, the stronger the wick — and the brighter I burned when I gave to the world. She was the kerosene. I lit the match. And I became the fire. Those around me saw my passion and energy, the warmth I brought to others. But they couldn’t see how I was burning myself alive — slowly turning to ash.
Am I the monster I see in horror films?
I couldn’t help but see myself in art horror films — mirrors of my reality, mirrors of my tether.
In Talk to Me, Mia keeps summoning her dead mother even though it’s destroying her. She can’t stop. Those moments with her mom — she needs them. It’s a high. A drug.
Was the ghost of my past the grip I couldn’t release, too?
In Bring Her Back, Laura tries to resurrect her daughter by sacrificing her adopted daughter. And I tried to escape my reality by sacrificing myself. We both refused to accept the world as it was — hers without her child, mine without my parents.
Laura killed for love. I tried to kill myself for the lack of it. Was I a killer?
In Hereditary, Annie holds a séance to hear her daughter one more time. She lets something in she can’t control — and it devours everyone around her.
Had I done the same? Let the ghost possess me — forever tied?
The pattern is the same: the dead are never fully dead because we want them to haunt us. We are tethered. We willingly let them in.
So who is the real monster? Is it Annie? Mia? Is it me?
But they’re not evil. They’re grieving. They became destructive because they couldn’t let go — and the obsession consumed them.
I saw myself in them. I created a home for my pain, and that home became my tether. I let it burn me to dust. It was the only way I knew how to feel purpose.
But there had to be another way.
I took inspiration from exorcisms in horror movies — a priest speaks with conviction that this demon has no power. It is fear that demons feed on, and it is strength that casts them out.
What if I could do the same — to reclaim control?
Healthier rituals to resurrect my inner child
What if I could be my own savior?
In moments when my wounds are exposed and burning, when I worry that I’m not selfless enough or not worthy enough to have my needs met, I catch myself before I catch fire. I close my eyes. I become the flame. I become the candle. No tether as the wick. I bring myself to my younger self and shine the light on her.
She’s hyperventilating in a fetal position.
“I don’t belong to anyone, so why should I belong in this world?” she says, a bottle of painkillers in her hand. “What’s the point?”
I sit beside her and offer my embrace. “Come into my arms. You can always belong to me, and I belong to you.”
She crawls into my arms. I wipe the tears from her cheeks, stroke her long black hair. Her cries begin to subside.
“I know you want to take your life,” I tell her. “But you have always been the life — the energy, the warmth in people’s lives. I love how you can be friends with anyone, never judging them for who they are. That’s who you’ve always been.”
She stares at me blankly. Stunned. She’d always believed she was a burden — never the one who uplifted those around her.
I hold her face in my hands — the way I wished someone had held mine. “It is because you are selfless that you are light. You don’t need to burn yourself to prove who you already are.”
Her breathing slows. She’s beginning to believe it — that she doesn’t have to sacrifice her needs. She doesn’t have to burn to deserve love.
“I am selfless light,” she fiercely proclaims.
“I am selfless light,” I mirror back, bringing myself to reality.
I didn’t need a Bible, a priest, or God to save me. I needed to be the mother I never had — to sit with my younger self and celebrate who she is.
Faith in my narrative.
Faith in my needs.
Faith in who I’ve always been — not my wound.
I had always thought I needed pain to be light, when I was always the light. Had I taken my life in that room, I would have missed the chance to become the woman I am now — someone who brings life into every room I enter.
I’m not selfish. I never was. I give from who I am.
What does it mean to truly “let go”?
As we transform obsessive rituals into healthy ones, the ghosts of our past begin to fade. The inner demons are cast out, but the ending is not always clean.
Through years of therapy, I learned that trauma doesn’t just disappear. We learn to carry it differently.
I might get triggered when I hear someone call me “selfish.” I might feel guilty again for not giving. But I now know I don’t need my pain to be my purpose. I can redirect my energy towards nourishing myself — my younger self is still me — instead of feeding the inner demons with fear.
The more we fear our demons, the stronger their grip. The more we lean into our strength — the internal narrative we know to be true — the more we repel the darkness.
The invitation is always yours: What ghost have you been holding the séance for? What is your tether? What would it mean to release it?