the ghost house
The Ghost House
A few years ago, I attended a Vipassana retreat (a residential experience which requires students to spend most of their time in noble silence, without external distractions, meditating for up to ten hours per day over a period of ten days). At the time, I shared very little about the experience on social media. Recently, I stumbled upon something I had written afterwards, and I felt compelled to share it. Perhaps it will resonate with your heart.
It was during those ten days of silence—no reading, no writing, no social or eye contact—that I came to a startling realisation: I had been living in a haunted house.
Wherever I went, I carried with me echoes of the past—a chorus of howls from ghosts of who I was told I should be by now, whispers of who I wished my parents had been, shadows of old romantic relationships, ancient self-fulfilling prophecies, and imagined parallel universes where better versions of my life unfolded.
I was engaged in ongoing conversations with phantoms of people long gone from my world. I dissected past exchanges, wondering if a single word (un)spoken could have changed everything. I romanticised pivotal moments, imagining that a different choice might have led to a happier, more successful, or more fulfilled version of myself.
Life had not turned out the way I wanted it to, and in an act of misguided defiance, Itried to get back at it by escaping into an imaginary mansion where it couldn’t touch me—where I felt in control.
This magical thinking told me that by refusing to accept what had happened, I could still change it. I acted as though sheer will could rewrite the past, as though clinging to grudges could shield me from grief, as though resisting the truth could somehow undo it.
In the silence, I was startled to realise that much of my time had been spent cut off from life, lost in the haunted halls of my own making, with my eyes covered in veils and my heart hardening in bitterness. If I truly wanted to live whatever remained, I realised, I had to let so much die.
I had to surrender to a radical acceptance of what had been—and what was.
No more clinging to fantasies of other lives:
A childhood spent in Switzerland, with a (loving) father.
A world where my youngest brother didn’t have cerebral palsy.
A timeline where my mother hadn’t fallen ill and moved continents.
A life where I married my childhood sweetheart and built a family.
Granted, if those things had or hadn’t happened, everything would be radically different. Better or worse—I’ll never know. I can either spend eternity believing they stand between me and a good life, or I can choose to create a great one by accepting them.
When we compare the messy, chaotic, and surprising reality of life to the mind’s idealised version—perfectly tied with a ribbon—life will inevitably feel like a disappointment. We trap ourselves in an endless war against life—a war lost the moment it began.
As I woke at 4 a.m. to meditate in the darkness, I glimpsed life shimmering just outside the windows of the ghost house I had built—a house locked from the inside out.
To step outside, I had to collapse all the imagined timelines and better universes that lived in my mind. I had to choose the only one that truly existed: this one, here and now.
The invitation was clear: commit to living this reality as though it were the best possible one—for, against all odds, it is the one miraculously shaped from infinite possibilities.
Ultimately, we must choose to either nurture fantasy or reality. For living in the past—or in a dream or nightmare—demands the sacrifice of the present: an offering that now felt too precious to make.
And so, I took a deep breath as I opened the door, stepped outside and…