on ghosting

👻 boo! I'm back

background photo by me, illo by me on Canva

Happy Halloweeeeeen 👻

Hey, remember me? It’s been a while.

You may have noticed my sudden departure from your inbox for the last month (okay, month and a half). If you didn’t, well, I probably need to do a better job of holding your attention.

But if you did notice (shout-out to those of you who sent messages checking in♡), I am so sorry for disappearing without warning!

My last post—so lovingly titled “how to blow up your life”—outlined the chaos my partner and I were just thrown into for what felt like the 20th time this year.

Shortly after publishing that piece, another ~unprecedented event~ occurred that made us worry a lot more about the types of information we’re sharing online. Unfortunately, America is becoming an increasingly scary place these days.

Long story short, we realized something needed to change here. So I stopped posting immediately, and I even archived a few posts that felt too dangerous to be public right now. If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll probably be able to figure out which ones if you poke around my archive.

This ~unprecedented event~ combined with my partner losing his job shook both of us up pretty hard. I became quickly overwhelmed by feelings of panic and job applications and book deadlines and lots of texts from friends and loved ones pouring in. I couldn’t keep up with it all. So I ghosted.

I stopped replying to texts. I stopped going out. I stopped posting on Throughlines. It’s not like anyone was forcing me to stop—though my therapist gently suggested it—but I instead felt this insane pressure of self-censorship.

I don’t like being told what to do. And as a former journalist, I certainly don’t like anybody telling me what truths I am and am not allowed to write about.

So I stopped, and I lost momentum, and I wondered if there was even any point to spewing my inner thoughts online every week, and I kept writing down essay ideas as they came to me. (On the upside, with less time spent here I quickly surpassed 100 pages of the book I’m writing!) The longer I went without posting, the more anxious I became about starting up again.

September faded into October.

The leaves turned amber and started to fall.

I couldn’t stop thinking about ghosts.

My late grandfather’s office is a shrine to the eighty-nine years of his existence. Filled with printouts of anything from his 2001 tax return to a story I wrote back when I was a Minnesota congressional reporter, that little windowless room in the basement of the house he shared with my grandmother holds so much history.

I stepped into the office this summer for the first time since he died, hoping to feel something. His ghost, perhaps? A note he’d left hidden for me somewhere?

I didn’t find either—probably for the best. But I found something almost as good.

try to imagine my excitement upon finding these! inner historian unlocked.

I found a stash of dozens of letters my 18-year-old grandpa sent to his mother during his time as a Marine in the 1950s. An absolute treasure trove.

Most of the letters were pretty boring—he told his mother about the ships he was sailing on, the friends he made, and occasionally wrote about a girl named “Mariann.”

Then I found a letter sent from my clearly heartbroken teenage grandfather: “I’ve been writing Mariann, but she hasn’t written back for three months. I guess it’s time to assume she’s dropped me. Or have you heard from her?”

Poor grandpa! Imagine being stuck on some ship 20 miles out from San Diego and your high school crush in Minnesota suddenly stops sending you letters. You can’t even text your mom to ask about her, you have to send her a letter and wait for several weeks to hear anything back. This would have killed me!

You know what? Now I don’t feel so bad about all the times I was ghosted (or, regrettably, became the ghost) back when I was dating. This shit has been happening since at least the 1950s.

Ghosting romantic pursuits can be cruel, for sure, especially when you’ve known the person for a long time. But honestly, the one thing that has made me so staunchly anti-ghosting has been the search for full-time employment.

I’ve literally never been more happy to receive rejection messages than I have been this fall.

Because the alternative is radio silence—after pouring my heart out into an application, after speaking with a recruiter, after being assured I’ll hear back by the end of the week. And look, I get it; companies don’t owe you much just because you applied for a job with them. But shouldn’t they at least owe you a rejection so that the tiny ray of hope you put out into the universe can be gently extinguished rather than left to take up your energy and burn itself out?

(The fact that I’m over here waxing poetic about job applications should be marked as a recession indicator, btw.)

If my grandpa could survive being ghosted back in 1953 and go on to meet my grandmother (and, decades later, meet the greatest granddaughter alive 💁🏼‍♀️), then I can maintain hope that either P or I will muscle past the monotonous drag of job applications and get at least one income on the books soon.

And, hey—I’m sorry about ghosting Throughlines. I have some exciting plans in the works, but things might look a little different around here as I figure out what I can freely share during these ~unprecedented times~.

Thanks for sticking with me, and as always:

We’ll get through this together.

xx Ashley