Prologue: Welcome to the Haunted House
From the outside, we look just fine.
We’ve mastered the art of appearing whole — the firm handshake, the confident smile, the calendar packed with purpose. We respond promptly, we dress appropriately, and we say we’re doing “great” even when the silence between conversations is louder than we’d like to admit. We keep moving — through decades, decisions, dinners, and deals — hoping that forward momentum might outrun the past.
But inside, many of us are haunted.
Not by ghosts in the cinematic sense — no rattling chains or haunted dolls. Just quieter, older companions: the memory we try not to revisit, the voice that questions our worth, the version of ourselves we buried so deeply we forgot they were still breathing. These ghosts don’t scream. They linger. They wear our old clothes. They know our passwords. They show up in board meetings, birthdays, hotel rooms, and the pause between texts. They ask questions when we finally slow down.
They are the unspoken. The unresolved. The unpaid emotional debts that collect interest over time. The past we call “character-building” but never actually looked in the eye.
I’ve spent decades in rooms where power is measured, pay is negotiated, and legacies are written. I’ve advised CEOs with ten-figure portfolios who flinch at the sound of their father’s name. I’ve seen boardroom titans undone by the offhanded comment of a sibling. I’ve watched men and women — brilliant, accomplished, and beloved — quietly confess that they’re still haunted by something that happened when they were seven years old.
And me? I’m no different.
I’ve carried my own ghosts — moments I mishandled, people I let slip away, silences I disguised as strength. And most of all, I’m haunted by the sons I miss. The boys I raised. The ones I lost. The sons whose laughter once filled the rooms I now move through more carefully than I used to. Their absence is the only thing that ever made the sun feel dim.
And yes — I’ve kept up appearances. I’ve become famous, shaken hands, made speeches, and smiled for the cameras. But I’ve also sat on a long flight home from Tokyo, staring out at the stars over the Pacific, when I finally understood that I’d been performing for an audience that left the theater a long time ago.
This isn’t a confession. And it’s not a therapy session in disguise.
This is an excavation – and a catharsis.
Because whether you’re a CEO in a corner office, or someone trying to hold your life together with humor and duct tape, you’ve got ghosts, too. Some wear the face of a parent you never impressed or the sibling you rivaled. Some sound like your ex. Some show up in the decisions you keep making, over and over, even though you know better.
We all live in a kind of haunted house — built from memories, myths, missteps, and moments that matter more than we like to admit. Some of us light candles and hope the ghosts stay quiet. Others pretend they’re not there at all. But the truth is: the longer we refuse to face them, the more they decorate the place without asking.
This piece isn’t about exorcism — it’s about recognition. It’s about turning on the lights. Listening to what the ghosts have to say. And then deciding what, if anything, we want to carry forward.
So come with me. Let’s open the closet. Let the ghosts out. Hear what they came for. And maybe — just maybe — laugh loud enough to let a few of them go.
Chapter I: Our Original Haunts
Before we ever negotiated a signing bonus, feigned surprise at a backstab, or had the emotional clarity to say, “It’s not you, it’s my childhood,” we were children — soft, impressionable, and largely unequipped for the absurdity ahead.
This is where it all started.
The ghosts didn’t crash through the windows. They walked in through the front door, usually carrying something that looked like love — or at least the adult version of it: approval, rules, rewards. They slipped into our heads on the backs of field trip permission slips and birthday party invitations. They wore our parents’ cologne. They sounded suspiciously like that first-grade teacher who told us to “use your inside voice” when we were just excited to be alive.
Let’s talk about Mom. Maybe she was perfect. Or maybe she was chronically disappointed in things she never quite said out loud. Maybe she gave affection like performance bonuses — generously, but only when metrics were met. Or maybe she gave everything and lost herself in the process, and you grew up learning to save people who never asked you to.
And Dad? Maybe he was supportive. Or maybe he thought affection was what happened when you handed someone a perfectly mowed lawn. Maybe he gave compliments once a decade — usually with a qualifier. “Nice job… but don’t get cocky.” Maybe he was present. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was the reason you still double-check your email for typos at 1:00 a.m.
And then there was school — that beautiful meat grinder of identity. You showed up with hope, glitter glue, and half a sandwich, and left with an inner critic that still pays rent. First-grade teachers with pastel cardigans and passive-aggressive red pens. Gym teachers with whistles and trauma. Classrooms where we learned multiplication, social hierarchy, and the fine art of emotional suppression.
Oh, and that first crush. That lopsided smile, that shared juice box, that slow-motion heartbreak on the jungle gym. We don’t talk enough about how formative that was — the first time we felt electricity when someone said our name… followed quickly by the first time we realized they preferred someone taller, funnier, or better at kickball. Welcome to romantic attachment theory — now with snack time.
And yet — there was joy. Real joy. There were popsicles and Saturday morning cartoons, scraped knees and backyard forts, sleepovers where the world felt infinite. There were moments of pure magic, unfiltered laughter, and the kind of awe we now pay therapists to help us remember. Childhood had its ghosts, sure — but it also had music. Sometimes both in the same room.
Still, most of us emerged from that house with silent contracts we never consciously agreed to. We internalized them like gospel:
We signed them in crayon and obeyed them with executive precision.
And that’s where the haunting begins. You think you’ve grown up — you’re in a blazer now, you have a parking space. But then someone gives you genuine praise and you flinch. Someone tells you “I’m proud of you,” and your brain hits the panic button. Or you fall for someone who reminds you — just enough — of the girl who broke your heart in third grade, and suddenly you’re planning a future with a ghost.
I once had a billionaire CEO, beloved by Wall Street, nearly break down over lunch when I asked him about his childhood. “My dad only complimented me once,” he said. “I was twelve. I hit a home run. I think I’ve been trying to recreate that moment ever since.” Then he ordered a third glass of wine and changed the subject to performance modifiers. We both knew the topic hadn’t changed.
Because that’s what these original haunts do. They shape everything. Not with force — but with familiarity. They don’t tell you what to do. They simply whisper, “This is how it’s always been.”
And unless you’re paying close attention, you’ll mistake the whisper for truth.
We call it humility, but it’s fear. We call it drive, but it’s shame with a motivational playlist. We call it standards, but it’s the memory of someone who made us feel like we had to earn our place at the table — and maybe we still are.
But here's the kicker: not all of it was bad. The ghosts weren’t all monsters. Some were guides. Some were reminders. And some were just little pieces of us, stuck in a moment we didn’t know how to leave.
The trick is knowing which ones to invite in… and which ones to finally show the door.
Because childhood wasn’t just where we were wounded. It was where we were wild. Where we dreamed big, loved fully, and trusted first. That kid — the one who believed the world was magical — is still in there, buried somewhere beneath tax returns and adult disappointments.
You just have to look hard enough to find them.
Because while our original haunts may have written the first chapter — they don’t get to write the last.
Chapter II: The Wonder Years
Adolescence is where the ghosts begin to get organized.
They stop drifting in dreamlike shadows and start showing up with names, playlists, and opinions. They look like gym teachers who humiliate you in front of the class. They sound like your mother’s voice echoing through the closed bedroom door. They feel like the heat on your neck when someone laughs at the wrong moment—when you tried, and failed, to be seen.
The wonder years, they call them. As if we weren’t all quietly falling apart in math class, learning to navigate a body we didn’t recognize, haunted by desires we didn’t yet understand.
This is where you first learn the difference between loneliness and solitude. Where you stop believing your parents have all the answers and start pretending you have a few of your own. It's where your reflection starts asking questions you’re not ready to answer, and your voice begins to crack under the weight of trying.
Adolescence is a performance—and you don’t even know you’re auditioning. Every hallway is a stage. Every lunch table, a jury. You learn to armor yourself in sarcasm, fashion, detachment, or effortlessness. You chase the impossible: to be original, but also invisible. Noticed, but not exposed.
And then, just as you're about to find your footing, your hormones stage a coup.
Sexuality enters stage left, wearing too much eyeliner and no shame. Suddenly your thoughts aren’t your own. You go from curious to obsessed in record time. You think about kissing someone so much you forget their last name. You fantasize about a conversation that ends with mutual admiration and instead get rejected in front of a vending machine. You become a pile of emotional confetti every time someone brushes past you in the hallway.
Some of us bloomed early. Some of us panicked late. Some of us still aren’t sure what we’re doing. But those awkward, beautiful, catastrophic first discoveries about desire—they never really leave. They just change costumes.
And yet, despite the camouflage, a few memories burn through with painful clarity:
Freshman Year – The First Echo
You show up hopeful. Maybe this year will be different. Maybe you’ll finally outrun the version of yourself you swore you’d shed in eighth grade. But high school doesn’t let you reintroduce yourself—it holds up a mirror instead. You trip. You fumble. You call a teacher “Mom” in front of twenty-five people. You survive.
You also notice, for the first time, that your body has opinions. Your biology logs on like a new app you didn’t download—and it starts issuing push notifications: “Look at them. No seriously—LOOK.”
Cue the awkward locker room stares. The blushes. The internet searches cleared quickly. You don’t yet have the language, but you’ve just discovered that your identity may be a little more complicated than the school playbill allows.
Sophomore Year – The Try-Hard Years
You push harder. You audition for things. You lean too far forward in your chair when someone attractive talks to you. You try on personalities like outfits from the clearance rack. You make playlists with too much meaning. You mistake politeness for affection. You want something—someone—to tell you that your efforts are not in vain. You get silence. You get stronger.
Meanwhile, your sexuality is working overtime. Your fantasies start to include people you’d never admit to. Your sense of self becomes an unreliable narrator. You tell your friends one version. You live another. You wonder if anyone else is as confused as you are. (They are. They're just louder liars.)
Junior Year – The Reckoning
You begin to grasp that life won’t wait for you to figure it out. The questions start arriving in earnest: Who am I? What am I good at? What’s worth caring about? You write college essays you don’t believe. You fall in love with the idea of being loved. You lie to yourself about both. The ghosts get louder.
This is also when sexuality becomes performative. The straight kids start dating badly. The gay kids start hiding better. Everyone pretends they’re more experienced than they are. One kid writes bad poetry and calls it seduction. Another sends a text they’ll regret for a decade. Virginity becomes currency. Shame becomes a language. And your future self? They’re silently screaming, “PLEASE don’t sleep with that person just because they know your name.”
Senior Year – The Soft Goodbye
Now you know. This isn’t forever. The final act is here, and you start narrating your own exit. Nostalgia arrives early. You think about legacy. About leaving a mark. You sign yearbooks with promises you won’t keep. You hug people you secretly resented. You prepare to leave the haunted house of adolescence, carrying with you the echoes of every voice that ever mattered—and every silence that did too.
You also carry your origin story. The heartbreak. The fumbling. The shame. The night you cried in your car because they didn’t text back. The crush that never noticed you. The one who did—and terrified you. That moment in senior year where, for once, it all clicked. A kiss that felt like truth. A hand that didn’t recoil. A second where you felt real, and seen, and safe.
There are no heroes in this chapter. Just survivors. No perfect memories. Just flickers of grace.
You don’t know it yet, but the ghosts you met here—the ones who told you that you were too much, too little, too strange, too slow—will follow you. They will disguise themselves as ambition, romance, risk. They will whisper through future jobs, lovers, late-night doubts.
They show up in boardrooms, disguised as imposter syndrome. They show up at dinner parties when you laugh too loud because you're still trying to be liked. They show up when your boss praises you and you immediately think, “If they only knew.”
The kid who got cut from the team still makes you doubt you're part of the inner circle. The girl who wasn't asked to prom now edits every email twice. The boy who never measured up now over-delivers and never sleeps.
Your teenage ghosts are your unofficial career advisors. They feed your need for external validation. They sit behind the wheel during salary negotiations and whisper, “Don't ask for too much—they might find someone better.” They're the reason you're still trying to prove you're smart, worthy, charming, indispensable.
And sometimes—just sometimes—they're why you still work weekends. Why you still care what the cool people think. Why you still walk into conference rooms like you're bracing for a pop quiz.
They’re also why you fall for the wrong people. Why you ghost the right ones. Why you think love should feel like a test. And why you still carry a quiet, unreasonable hope that someone, somewhere, might choose you and mean it.
And as for those classmates?
Some of them became surgeons. Some became felons. Some are still stuck in their hometowns, holding onto a version of themselves that peaked with a varsity jacket. Others have climbed so high they can’t breathe the air anymore. A few turned their ghosts into art. Others married them. Some disappeared quietly, wrapped in the silence of ordinary lives. And a few—God help us—became life coaches.
But all of them, in one way or another, are still in the room. Still influencing how you walk into one. Still shaping what you say—and what you don’t.
But there is something else too. Something equally stubborn:
The echo of the you who kept going. Who showed up, even in mismatched socks. Who stayed kind, even after rejection. Who didn’t get the part, the grade, the date—but got out anyway.
This chapter is for them.
The ones who endured the wonder years. And the ghosts they carried out with quiet dignity and a crooked grin.
Chapter III: College - The Wonder Years (Revisited)
The ghosts don’t take a break just because you’ve switched zip codes. If anything, they go to college with you. They sign up for classes you don’t remember choosing—Insecurity 101, Overcompensation in Groups, Advanced Sexual Panic. They major in Regret and minor in Performance. Welcome to your early twenties.
If high school was rehearsal, college is your off-Broadway debut: underfunded, directionless, and tragically overacted. Here you are, trying to sculpt an identity with a meal plan, four roommates, and a student ID photo that looks like it was taken under duress. There’s newfound freedom, yes—but also chaos masquerading as possibility.
You reinvent yourself on day one. You quote obscure philosophers whose names you can’t pronounce. You tell people your favorite film is something subtitled. You try on new identities like hats: too big, too bold, and occasionally on backwards. You build a personality out of sarcasm, caffeine, and whatever you can afford from the campus bookstore.
Dorm Life and Delusion
Your first dorm room is a design crime scene: cinderblock chic with a touch of early-century anxiety. There’s always one guy with a mini-fridge stocked like a liquor cabinet and another who insists on playing guitar at midnight. You pretend not to care, but secretly, you’re auditioning for everyone—hoping to land the role of “Most Likely to Seem Like They Have Their Shit Together.”
You go to parties where the music is too loud and the conversation too thin. You flirt like a malfunctioning chatbot. You mistake eye contact for destiny. You meet someone at a frat party and mentally design your wedding before learning their last name is a number. And then—just when you think you’ve found your footing—the ghosts sneak back in. Wearing hoodies. And carrying receipts.
They arrive during roll call: the kid who got cut from JV, the girl who was always picked last, the awkward theater nerd you tried to outgrow. They set up shop in your psyche like they’re paying rent. Every time you speak up in class, they whisper, "Try-hard." Every time you stay quiet, they hiss, "Coward." They have opinions. And access to your browser history.
And this is how they start to shape your future: not with fire and brimstone, but with small detours. You drop a class you love because you’re afraid of sounding dumb. You don’t ask a professor for help because you think needing help is weakness. You don’t apply for that internship because deep down, the ghosts have already decided you’re not good enough.
The Internship Years
You land your first internship. You celebrate by buying the cheapest business casual you can find and spend the first week in blisters and imposter syndrome. You nod enthusiastically at things you don’t understand. You write emails that sound like corporate fan fiction. You survive on stale coffee and the hope that no one asks you a question in a meeting.
This is when you begin to understand: corporate life is a play, and no one gave you the script. The ghosts helpfully offer one: the script of self-doubt, of not-good-enough, of "maybe if I say nothing, they won’t fire me or worse—notice me." You keep a browser tab open for your résumé and another for panic attacks disguised as TED Talks.
You carry the ghost of not being seen, and so you overcompensate. Or you underachieve. You play it safe, stay invisible, agree to unpaid labor with a thank-you smile. You think you’re being smart. What you’re really doing is building a career on a foundation poured by fear. And fear doesn’t make for good architecture.
Love and Other Majors
Love in your twenties is part romantic comedy, part dark psychological thriller. Everyone is confused and overcommitted. You date someone who tells you they’re emotionally available but only from 3 to 5 p.m. on alternate Wednesdays. You fall too hard, too fast, or not at all. You realize too late that sex and intimacy are wildly different currencies—and you've been paying in Monopoly money.
The ghosts are relentless here. They show up in your Tinder matches. They critique your outfits before a date. They compare every partner to that one high school crush who never looked your way. They remind you, just as someone leans in for a kiss, that you once used the word "moist" in a love letter.
They also ruin relationships before they begin—by convincing you not to show your real self. They sabotage the ones that might have worked. And they push you into ones that never had a chance, just so you can feel something familiar: rejection, abandonment, chaos. Eventually, you begin to confuse chaos with chemistry.
And yes, they screw with your career too—because if you’re terrified of connection, guess what you don’t get good at? Networking. Team-building. Speaking up in a meeting when it matters. You don’t just ghost exes—you ghost opportunities.
Graduation: The Curtain Call
Graduation is a strange kind of funeral. You toss a cap in the air to bury an era you barely survived. They hand you a diploma like a warranty you’ll never use and say, "Go change the world." You don’t know how to change a tire.
You walk across the stage wondering if your GPA matters, if your ex will be watching, and if your parents will finally stop asking what you plan to do with a degree in "Interdisciplinary Self-Discovery." You hug people you’ll never see again. You cry for reasons you can’t name. And the ghosts? They’re in the audience. Clapping. Smiling. Knowing they’ve secured long-term leases in your subconscious.
But they’re not just saboteurs. Some of them are guides. They remind you what mattered. What still does. They show you how you kept going. That there was laughter. That there were wins. That the shame didn’t stick nearly as well as you feared. And that, despite all odds, you didn’t give up.
You leave college with fewer answers than you arrived with. But you leave with stories. With bruises that became badges. With a few friendships that might just survive geography and time zones. And with a new kind of laugh—the one you let out when you remember the absurdity and survive it anyway.
You haven’t exorcised your ghosts. But now, when they show up uninvited, you offer them a drink and ask them what they’ve learned. And sometimes they surprise you. Sometimes they say: You did better than you think.
Welcome to your twenties. Still haunted. Still hilarious. Still standing. And now? Maybe just a little more ready to rewrite the script.
Chapter IV: Your Job, Your Persona, and Your Delusions
Before the job, before the office badge, before the six hours you spent choosing the least embarrassing headshot for your email profile—there was the idea of who you thought you’d become. A dream stitched together from internships, Netflix dramas, parental expectations, and whatever LinkedIn said “driven professionals” do. You didn’t just walk into your first job—you debuted. Wearing ambition like cologne, certainty like armor, and delusion like a name tag.
This chapter isn’t just about what we did—it’s about who we thought we were. The stories we told to get the job. The masks we wore to keep it. The mentors who lifted us up—or threw us under the moving bus of corporate ambition. And the ghosts—oh, the ghosts—who trailed behind, reminding us that even in a standing desk jungle, we are never alone.
The Résumé: When We First Practiced to Deceive
You emerge from college with a diploma in one hand and a résumé in the other—basically a fever dream printed on 32-pound bond paper. It’s not a document; it’s an act of performance art. Half-true, half-delusional, and entirely soaked in desperation. Leadership roles you never led. Interests you plagiarized from a date who dumped you. A GPA inflated like a VC-backed dating app. But it’s in Garamond, and that’s what counts. You feel... ready.
We were told the résumé would be our golden ticket. Instead, it became our first audition for the theater of adulthood—complete with self-delusion, exaggeration, and just enough buzzwords to drown our imposter syndrome.
The ghosts? They start here. With every embellished bullet point, we summon the phantom of who we wish we were. And it works. We get the job. And from day one, we’re haunted by the version of us they hired—not the one who just cried in the bathroom over a confusing Excel formula.
Babysitting? "Youth development coordination." Waiting tables? "Dynamic multitasking in high-stress culinary environments." Unemployment? "Consulting."
We weren’t ready. But our résumés said we were. And those ghosts—of insecurity, of comparison, of someone else’s LinkedIn—followed us into the building.
The Office Mask
Enter the mask. Polished. Punctual. Expert in synergy. Fluent in fake enthusiasm. It arrives on day one with your ID badge and never quite comes off.
You learn the corporate dialect: “Just circling back,” “Quick touch base,” “Per my last email.” You become a master of the 8:17 a.m. smile. You keep three open tabs at all times—Slack, your inbox, and your soul slowly leaving your body.
You wear headphones with no music playing, just to avoid conversation. You say things like, "Let's ideate that offline" while wondering what your dog thinks you're doing all day. You answer emails at 10:47 p.m. not because you're efficient—but because you're afraid of being forgotten.
The mask says you belong. But the ghost underneath knows better. That ghost remembers high school humiliation, college doubt, family pressure, and the friend who told you this place “wasn’t really your vibe.”
Eventually, the mask cracks—during an all-hands Zoom with your camera on and dignity off, or when you realize the “team lunch” is a mandatory slide review with gluten-free sadness.
That’s when you understand: you weren’t faking it until you made it. You were faking it because you didn’t think you could ever be enough.
The ghosts under the mask? They’re noisy. The one who whispers, “They’re going to find out.” The one who reminds you of your failure to negotiate a starting bonus. The one who tells you you're only here because someone more qualified ghosted the interview.
Still, you march on. Because the mask isn’t just a lie—it’s armor. It protects you until you become the person you were pretending to be all along. Hopefully.
First Mentors, First Betrayals
And then—light! A mentor. A champion. The first person who looks at you and says, “You’ve got something.” And for a brief, shining moment, you believe it. - Until the cc: line says otherwise.
The betrayal always comes wrapped in praise. “You’re my go-to.” “You’re a star.” “You remind me of me.” Translation? “I will now shape you into a slightly shinier version of my own regrets.”
Here come the archetypes:
This is when trust becomes a luxury item. You replay old Slack messages like breakup texts. You draft fake LinkedIn updates just to feel something. You start referring to yourself in third-person in performance reviews. Ghosts thrive here. Every time you get passed over, undermined, or blamed for a missing attachment, they whisper, “Told you so.”
Compensation Envy
You overhear that Chad—who once asked if Wi-Fi is short for something—makes $30K more than you. And he gets a parking spot.
You pretend to understand Performance Shares and RSUs. You say "total comp" like it’s a religion. You Google, “How to negotiate salary without crying”.
Comp envy isn’t about greed. It’s about ghosts. The ones that tell you, “If you were really good, you’d be making more.” The ones that remember every piano recital you crushed and every science fair you lost. And suddenly, you're explaining to your therapist why Chad’s bonus feels like a personal betrayal.
You tell yourself you're noble. You say you're “playing the long game.” But you still flinch when someone brags about their total rewards package and stocks you can't spell.
Ghosts? Oh, they feast on this one.
Romance in the Workplace: Where Ghosts Breed Both Sweet Dreams and Nightmares
Hey Sports Fans, you work together twelve hours a day and s*%t happens—and let’s not pretend it doesn’t. More than once (or twice).
It always starts innocently. A flirty eye-roll during QBR. A shared trauma over bad coffee. A mutual disdain for Steve from Procurement. You're both running on caffeine and cortisol, trading decks and deadlines in a pressure cooker 12-hour days that blur the lines between partnership and something far more dangerous. You're not just colleagues—you’re co-conspirators. And eventually, you're finishing each other's sentences, spreadsheets, and, well...dinner.
Sometimes it's sublime. You're a power duo. Batman and Robin. You crush deliverables by day and Pinot by night. You sync your calendars and your Apple Music playlists. You co-author slide decks and weekend grocery lists. You're high-functioning, high-achieving, and high on each other—and it works. Until it doesn’t.
Because when it doesn't? It doesn't end. It detonates. Like a WMD.
You see their name in a group thread and your stomach mutinies. You avoid the oat milk fridge like it’s booby-trapped. You mute their laugh in your memory—but somehow it still echoes from the copier bay.
This is where the ghosts bloom. The ghosts of:
The breakup doesn't just crater your inbox—it haunts your ambition. Suddenly, you're second-guessing every compliment they ever gave you. Was it real praise or romantic bias? Did you get the stretch assignment because of merit—or because they still had your hoodie?
And then comes the true haunting: the meetings, the metrics, the Monday standups where you're expected to deliver OKRs while suppressing a heartbreak that smells faintly like their cologne.
But not every office affair ends in HR purgatory. Sometimes, the pain polishes you. You learn to draw lines. You rediscover your ambition. You finally understand why HR sends those awkward relationship policy emails. Heartbreak becomes a boot camp. Trauma becomes tenure.
Eventually, the ghosts go quiet. They don’t vanish—but you learn to work beside them. You become wiser, funnier, and infinitely more strategic about who you fall for—and whether they have access to your Slack channel.
Because this isn’t just about workplace romance. It’s about the way our inner ghosts—of longing, of validation, of not feeling seen—find a home in someone who just happens to share our printer.
Welcome to your career: where deliverables get met, hearts occasionally detonate, and the best stories begin with, "So there was this QBR..."
Take a bow. Not because it’s over—but because you’re still here, ghost-whisperer and all.
Chapter V: The One That Got Away (and the Ones That Should Have)
Let’s face it: the greatest ghost story ever told doesn’t unfold in a haunted mansion—it plays out in your heart. Or, more precisely, in the living room of your childhood home. Welcome to Chapter V, where the skeletons in your romantic closet emerge dressed as lovers, exes, missed connections, and one terrifyingly accurate “You up?” text.
Love, lust, and emotional self-sabotage don’t arrive fully formed one day in adulthood, knocking politely at your emotional door. No, they’ve been squatting in your psyche rent-free since you learned how to spell "forever." They rode shotgun in your parents’ car, sulked with you at prom, and whispered sweet nothings in your ear the first time someone made you feel just like Mom or Dad did. These ghosts? They're not metaphors. They're method actors, and your love life is their stage.
We chase what hurt us. We ignore what healed us. And sometimes, we marry the ghost—just to get closure.
We don’t fall in love with people—we fall in love with the story we wrote about them in our head.
Welcome to the romantic horror picture show.
Freud Was Right - And So Was Your Ex.
Here’s a bone-chilling truth: most of us spend our adult lives re-auditioning for the roles we never got cast in as kids. We replay our trauma like it’s a Broadway revival. We date people who remind us of the ones who broke us—because repetition feels like resolution, and familiarity wears the mask of love.
We seek out lovers who feel like our mothers. We chase partners our fathers would’ve stormed out over. We gravitate to dynamics that mimic the chaos of childhood—because it feels like home.
That icy, withholding crush? Dad in a tie. The chaotic, unpredictable partner? Mom after two glasses of wine and a cryptic remark. The one who ghosted and returned like a Marvel villain with a mixtape? That’s childhood, rebooted.
We think we want romance. What we really want is redemption.
The One That Got Away (And Why We Still Stalk Their Instagrams)
There’s always one. The myth. The monsoon. The soulmate we hallucinated into existence.
They weren’t perfect—just perfectly calibrated to awaken every childhood wound like it came with a loyalty program. Their kiss? Electric. Their emotional availability? Unplugged.
But they lit a fire you haven’t put out since. You still remember:
They were the peak. The plunge. The reason you cried into tacos on a Tuesday. And now they’re a ghost, showing up in your dreams, your Discover Weekly, and your therapist’s recurring nightmare.
Did you love them? Or were you just trying to finally win that one game of emotional tag you lost at eight years old?
The Ones That Should Have Gotten Away (But Somehow Stayed)
These are the human potholes you swore you'd never hit. The more you drank, the better they looked. By midnight, they were “misunderstood.” By 2 a.m., they were soulmates. By 3 a.m., you were googling apartments in their city like Zillow was a dating app.
They weren’t different. They were the:
They lived in Airbnbs. Their job title was “senior consultant.” Their biggest commitment was to their skincare routine.
You didn’t stay because they were right. You stayed because your ghosts were loud, and their ghosts knew the lyrics.
The Ghosts That Haunt the Sheets
This isn’t just about heartbreak. This is about thoseintimacy ghosts—the ones that linger in the bed, the breath, the silence.
The ghost that taught you sex = validation. The ghost that taught you love = control. The ghost that made vulnerability feel like Russian roulette.
You lie next to someone new, and you’re not alone—you’re with everyone who ever made you doubt you were lovable. You reach for affection, and shame grips your hand first. You finally find kindness—and recoil, because peace feels suspicious.
When someone truly sees you, your first instinct is to run. Because if they see you, they might also see the pile of unresolved goodbyes you sleep with.
Why the F%#k Do We Do This?
Because we’re haunted. We date like archaeologists, digging through old wounds and calling it romance.
We’re not chasing people—we’re chasing plot corrections. Trying to revise history using new characters in the same cursed script.
And when it falls apart (because it always does), we blame ourselves, not the ghost in the director’s chair.
We text at 1:13 a.m., hoping for closure but settling for chaos. We confuse intensity for connection. We mistake anxiety for attraction.
We say we want love. But what we really crave is the moment someone finally stays - Even if they shouldn’t.
Ghost Management for the Romantically Possessed
Let’s skip the therapy bulls^*t and go straight to the exorcism. Stop:
Read your text history like it’s a sacred text—one you’ve finally outgrown. Ask, “Is this love—or just unresolved family dynamics with better abs?”
Because the one that got away? Probably should have. And the one you haven’t met yet? Deserves the you who’s fired the ghosts, burned the old scripts, and finally started living in the present.
Take a bow. You made it. You didn’t ghost yourself.
And if you’re lucky? You’ll fall in love again—with someone who doesn’t just see your wounds, but, more so, sees your worth.
Now go block your ex and call your therapist.
Chapter VI: Family, Part II — The Return of the Repressed
You become your mother. You resent your father. Your kids become mirrors. Your siblings become real estate enemies. And your parents? They become your children right about the time you finally figured out how to forgive them. Welcome to the next phase of family: equal parts sequel, courtroom drama, and haunted house.
The family you once knew morphs into a collection of roles you didn’t audition for. Caregiver. Referee. Executor. Unpaid tech support. And just when you think you’ve finally escaped the dysfunction, a holiday dinner resurrects it with a vengeance—alongside Aunt Sheila’s famous dry ham.
Generational trauma is the worst family heirloom—and it doesn't even come with a receipt.
"My family put the ‘fun’ in dysfunction… right after they put it in a trust account."
This is the era of reckoning. The years when you start to realize how much of your personality is just generational residue with better shoes. Your childhood echoes through your parenting. Your parents’ quirks become your reflexes. You catch yourself yelling things like, "Because I said so!" and suddenly you’re haunted by the ghost of your own upbringing.
Parents Start to Age
One day, they’re mowing the lawn in white sneakers. The next, you’re setting up their Wi-Fi and explaining what a QR code is. You become the tech support, the medication manager, the person who reminds them that no, the voicemail isn’t full because of a conspiracy.
The reversal is slow but merciless. You tuck them in. You check their passwords. You tell them not to believe everything they see on Facebook. And when you try to hold onto your temper as they forget your kids’ names or ask what your job is for the seventh time that month, a voice in your head whispers, “This was them, once—changing your diapers, cutting the crusts off your sandwiches, cheering at the 4th grade spelling bee like it was the Super Bowl.”
You love them. You’re frustrated by them. And you start seeing the clock. Both theirs and yours.
Kids Start to Judge
Children are truth mirrors with no tact. They catalog your neuroses and recycle them in therapy. You’ll be giving a perfectly reasonable bedtime lecture and suddenly hear your own parent’s voice come out of your mouth—and see your kid roll their eyes with generational disgust.
They judge. Silently at first. Then with increasing fluency. Your work ethic? A trauma response. Your curfew policy? Tyrannical. Your stories about walking uphill both ways in the snow? Gaslighting.
They have memes for everything you got wrong. And they use them like digital daggers.
But here’s the thing—they’re not wrong. You tried your best with a cracked map. You gave love filtered through your own ghosts. And they’re out there now, in therapy, rewriting the story. That’s their job.
And the Ghosts Multiply
You thought you’d outgrown the family ghosts. You thought they were buried back in your childhood bedroom next to the lava lamp and that shoebox of angsty poetry. But no. They’ve multiplied. Like drunken bunnies. Now they show up as inheritance squabbles. As pointed remarks over Zoom calls. As bitter laughter echoing through holiday toasts.
You hear your father’s silence in your brother’s withdrawal. You see your mother’s resentment in your sister’s smile. You recognize the same wounds. You realize you all inherited the same haunted house—and everyone’s trying to redecorate without acknowledging the skeleton in the foyer.
Some ghosts wear pearls. Some send group texts. Some only come out during election years.
And then there are our favorite family pastimes that look like an Emmy-winning reality-TV series with you cast in the lead role of Kafka. Your nightmares? They didn’t just become reality. They became syndication.
And somehow, you survive it.
Because family isn’t just a noun—it’s a series of unpaid roles, unresolved plotlines, and reluctant reunions. It’s the slow, strange realization that you are now the adult you once couldn’t wait to escape. That the stories you once heard about others are now being told about you.
And through it all—through the cold wars, casseroles, and whispered estate strategies—you still hope for grace. For a call. For one more dinner that ends in laughter instead of litigation.
This isn’t the family you imagined. But it’s the one you’ve got. And even if the ghosts never fully leave, maybe you’ve learned to dance with them around the dinner table.
Take a bow. You’re still here. And the dessert is probably haunted.
Chapter VII: Health, Hormones, and the Mystery of Our Bodies — The Ghost in Our Machine Breaks Down
Welcome to the era of mystery aches, midlife crisis Teslas, and the sudden realization that your back now has opinions. This is the decade where your metabolism ghosted you, your hairline is retreating like a demoralized army, and your joints audibly file HR complaints every time you sit down too fast.
The biting truths are that:
Somewhere between the vitamins you can’t pronounce and the bloodwork that looks like a crypto graph, you realize something horrifying: this body—the one that used to bounce back from all-nighters and bourbon—is now haunted. Haunted by late nights, bad habits, stress-induced cortisol surges, a brief flirtation with keto, and twenty years of ignoring "check engine" lights from your liver.
And for me? Let’s just say I’ve danced with more than a few ghosts. Two airplane crashes. Years of ocean racing. I’ve been hurled through the sky and hammered by seas that could flatten most egos. I’ve trekked through Africa, crawled through the jungles of Southeast Asia, kissed penguins in Antarctica, and walked away from more barroom brawls than Rip Wheeler. Every broken rib tells a story. Every scar sings backup. My spine is a titanium and carbon fiber miracle. My knees carry passport stamps. And yet, somehow, against medical odds and common sense, I’m still here writing to you, Sports Fans. And probably still will as a ghost from the grave.
The Ghost of Invincibility
Once upon a time, you could leap out of bed after three hours of sleep, run a half-marathon fueled only by beer and youth, and survive on microwaved burritos without gastrointestinal vengeance. Now, if you sleep funny, your neck files for divorce.
Your body, once a trusted accomplice in crime, now feels like a grumpy union worker on strike. It negotiates every move. "Oh, you want to bend down and tie your shoes? That’ll be two ibuprofen and a heating pad." Even your hangovers now send formal resignation letters to your dignity.
We Age — We Deny
You used to ignore the whispers. Now the whispers have megaphones.
Your mom, once the pillar of all things, now needs help logging into her email—and your dad, who refused to go to the doctor for 40 years, suddenly knows the name of every specialist within a 20-mile radius. Their medicine cabinet looks like a pharmaceutical gift basket curated by Kafka.
You become their tech support, their driver, their pill sorter, their emotional scaffolding. You try to keep them alive with kale, calendars, and pure uncut denial. And somewhere between arguing with a nurse about billing codes and trying to install a hearing aid app on an iPad from 2012, it hits you: this is your future. The on-boarding period for your own bodily bankruptcy.
You Judge Yourself — You Judge Others
The mirror stops being a friend and starts acting like a forensic pathologist. That bump? That mole? That shadow under your eye? Your Google search history now reads like a mashup between a CDC database and a Reddit panic spiral.
You try intermittent fasting, wheatgrass juice, magnesium supplements, cryotherapy, cayenne suppositories, and twelve-step skincare routines. You hike. You hydrate. You hum affirmations to yourself like a deranged monk with a Goop subscription. But let’s be real—you’re not trying to be immortal. You’re just trying to poop regularly and not have a panic attack while doing your taxes.
You side-eye your fit friend with the six-pack like they’re a cult recruiter. You resent your partner’s cholesterol numbers. You judge your younger colleagues for their energy while quietly wondering if they’ll cry at their first colonoscopy.
And speaking of colonoscopies—don’t ignore them. Or mammograms. Or pap smears. Or that yearly physical you keep pushing off because your calendar is too full of meetings, dates, Netflix, or denial. Because ghosts don’t just whisper—they metastasize.
You think it’s just a tickle in your throat, a stomach ache, a dizzy spell. But Cleopatra isn’t the only Queen of Denial. You are too. Until the scan lights up. Until the blood test calls you back. Until the ghost inside your machine stops whispering and starts roaring.
Our Health Haunts Them — Their Health Haunts Us
Your kids, meanwhile, are treating your wellness journey like a live-action Boomer sitcom. They mock your ergonomic pillow, your turmeric obsession, your fondness for walking in malls. They call your new shoes "orthopedic-chic" and whisper about your cholesterol like it’s a plot twist.
They’ve never known a world where your body didn’t come with a charger, an app, and a mood tracker. They’re baffled by the concept of handwriting and horrified by the fact you drank from a garden hose. And you? You’re baffled they need to be reminded to go outside.
They roll their eyes when you schedule a DEXA scan. They laugh when you grunt getting off the couch. But when they get a weird test result or a shadow on an x-ray? You’re the first person they call. Their ghost is fear; yours is love.
How Our Health Ghosts Haunt Us
Because health isn’t just physical. It’s emotional. It’s psychic. It’s the long trail of unchecked grief. It’s the colonoscopy you skipped, the mammogram you rescheduled three times, the pap smear you never got around to, the therapy you couldn’t afford, the doctor you didn’t trust, the second opinion you were too scared to hear.
Every night you told your body to shut up. Every hangover that whispered, "This is not sustainable." Every adrenaline spike that wore down your bones. Every loved one who got diagnosed too late. Every funeral you didn’t expect to attend this soon.
We carry ghosts in our bloodwork, our brittle nails, our sleepless nights. Ghosts of jobs that nearly killed us, relationships that almost did, and family patterns that continue to. Ghosts that show up in our prescriptions, in our MRIs, in the way we forget words and remember traumas.
And still—we show up. We take the meds. We drink the tea. We look in the mirror and try not to scream. We laugh when it hurts (because it always does). We hug with the arm that aches. We walk with the knee that wobbles. We endure.
This chapter of your life is not the one you brag about. It’s the one that humbles you. The one that peels you back. The one where your real strength, your real humanity, is revealed.
So yes—take the damn fiber. Wear the good shoes. Say yes to the MRI. Laugh with your kids when you can’t pronounce the name of your medication. Be kind to your body. It’s been through hell—and it’s still trying.
Take a bow. You’re still alive.
And that Sports Fans, is a goddamn miracle.
Chapter VIII: Social Media — The Haunted House of Ourselves
Here lies every filtered smile, passive-aggressive quote, Facebook Friend, Instagram Story, TikTok dance, and drunken DM your children, your conscience, and your lawyer begged you not to post.
Your digital self is curated, manicured, boosted, cropped, filtered, and emotionally unstable. It's the high-gloss version of you that never ages, never cries, never forgets to put its best angle forward—but behind the ring light is a haunted mansion of comparison, regret, and existential dread.
The biting truth is we don’t just haunt ourselves — we broadcast it. There is nothing more terrifying than your 2011 Facebook memories resurfacing in the middle of a board meeting.
Every status update is a séance. Every selfie, a smoke signal. Every tweet, a Ouija board for your worst instincts. Post at your own peril—and definitely not after the second glass of Malbec.
Remember that inspirational quote you posted in 2014? Turns out it was a direct quote from Charles Manson. That tequila the stripper poured down your throat in Vegas? Your soon-to-be-ex's new attorney loved it. And her mystery boyfriend (your personal trainer) liked it – twice – as it went viral on Facebook. That LinkedIn brag post? You spelled "Chief Strategy Officer" wrong. And don't even start with the Reels you made to get your kids to think you were "cool." Like little lurking nuclear weapons waiting to turn your life into your own personal Chernobyl.
What you can't see won't hurt you, right? Wrong. Those ghosts are floating out there every minute, 24/7/365 like Casper with fangs—digitized, immortal, and just one subpoena away from a guest appearance in your next HR meeting.
Social media is the haunted attic of your psyche. Every like is a ghost patting your ego on the head. Every comment section is a digital exorcism. Every viral video is just another layer of self you have to live up to or explain away.
You don’t delete tweets. You bury them—under layers of digital dirt and prayer.
You scroll past your ex’s engagement. You stumble upon a college roommate’s 4th kid. You compare your Tuesday leftover Pad Thai to a private chef’s 7-course Omakase Dinner on Instagram. Then you click “like” and pretend not to feel the ghost of your self-esteem scratching at the floorboards.
You post your vacation while secretly battling burnout. You tag your spouse while wondering why they haven’t texted back. You share that meditation meme while scream-crying into a pillow. Congratulations: you’ve joined the cast of your own self-directed psychological horror.
And yet we scroll. We post. We overshare. We upload our grief, our joy, our takeout, our traumas. We perform wellness, curate chaos, and pretend the algorithm is a higher power that understands us.
But deep down, we know that:
Your ghost lives online now, smiling on a beach in a year you swore you'd never revisit. And you? You're watching yourself live your best life...from the couch, in sweatpants, doom-scrolling through everyone else's highlight reel.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s surveillance.
So go ahead. Post the photo. Write the caption. Share the story. Just remember: the Internet is forever. And the ghosts we feed here never log off.
So, for now, take a bow. You’re trending.
Chapter IX: America’s Ghosts — National Denials and Cultural Rewinds
Slavery. Genocide. Jim Crow. Internment camps. Endless wars. Corporate pillaging. Surveillance capitalism. Cancel culture. And now, the grand finale: algorithmic tribal warfare in 4K. This country has a graveyard full of unresolved business — and we keep treating it like a TED Talk.
Welcome to the haunted house of the American dream. Built on stolen land, maintained by unpaid labor, renovated by Wall Street, gentrified by Silicon Valley, and now live-streamed for your performative outrage.
But the biting truth is that:
Ghosts of the Founding
Let’s go back to 1776—the original horror pilot. Written by men who preached liberty while owning humans. Thomas Jefferson, who penned "all men are created equal" while owning 600 slaves and carrying on a long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved. The contradictions weren’t bugs. They were features.
Fast forward through manifest destiny and you get a real estate expansion project disguised as divine right. The Trail of Tears—an actual horror movie in historical form. The Mexican-American War. Civil War. Reconstruction—briefly. Then Jim Crow, Redlining, mass incarceration, rinse, repeat.
The Specters of Capitalism
Ghosts of broken unions, gutted pensions, and offshore bank accounts whisper through the marble halls of D.C. CEOs earn 400x more than their employees—and that’s before bonuses, backdated stock options, and the private jet tax deduction.
The opioid epidemic? Engineered in a boardroom. The housing crash? Marketed as opportunity. The student loan crisis? An annuity for hedge funds. We privatized every ghost that could have taught us something—and put it behind a paywall.
Red States, Blue States, and the Great American Poltergeist
The red states wave their flags like trauma blankets, convinced freedom means no vaccine and bigger trucks. The blue states sip overpriced oat milk lattes while cancelling each other for saying "Latinx" wrong. Meanwhile, billionaires buy elections, and candidates campaign on nostalgia for a country that never existed.
Both sides have ghosts. And neither wants to look in the mirror.
Republicans invoke Ronald Reagan like Beetlejuice—say his name three times and trickle-down economics will reappear, ignoring the Iran-Contra scandal that nearly unraveled the entire illusion. Democrats parade JFK’s ghost like a blue hologram of hope—while quietly burying the Bay of Pigs, his hidden Addison’s disease, and his entanglements with Marilyn Monroe and Judith Exner.
Clinton? The saxophonist we forgave—a brilliant politician, a misogynistic womanizer, and the only president too cheap to pay his dry-cleaning bill, letting Monica’s blue dress do the talking for his legacy. Enter Hillary - Don’t forget the ghosts of Whitewater, the suspiciously long Clinton body count lists, 30,000 deleted emails, and the Benghazi disaster that left 4 staff dead and more than just the embassy walls in ruin. What's worse, her ghosts set up the first win for that guy with the bad hair and orange foundation makeup.
Obama? The ghost of eight years of soaring rhetoric with too few receipts. Talked a great game. Left the court early.
Trump? A fever dream turned executive order. Equal parts carnival barker and chaos merchant. A ghost story being written in real-time—hush money, classified documents, January 6, and more indictments than policy wins.
Biden? The affable placeholder. Grandpa Amtrak with ghosts of cognitive decline whispering between gaffes. A figurehead steering through fog while the marionettes pulled the strings while his staff juggled cue cards.
Senator Joseph McCarthy? The witch-hunting, red-baiting ghost whose shadow still lingers in Senate chambers and Twitter threads.
Roy Cohn and Dick Cheney? Walking night terrors. One mentored Trump and destroyed reputations and lives for sport; the other engineered wars, waterboarding, and wiretaps with a pacemaker and a smirk. And you thought Nosferatu was a myth?
The Undead Presidency
Every picture tells a story, and many presidents leave behind ghosts:
Hell, America’s political ghosts would make a horror movie that would put John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and George Romero movies to shame.
War and Peace (and PTSD)
We’ve invaded more countries than we can pronounce. We build statues to generals and ignore the homeless veterans who served under them. We salute the troops and then cut their benefits. We honor the fallen while ghosting the broken.
From Korea to Vietnam, Iraq to Afghanistan—each war, another ghost. Friendly fire. Faulty intel. Forgotten promises. We leave our ghosts behind—sometimes buried. Sometimes breathing.
Guns, God, and Glory
Mass shootings? Ghosts of a Second Amendment never meant for AR-15s. Prayer in school? We kicked out God and replaced him with standardized testing. America is a church of spectacle now. The pews are stadium seats. The sermons are TEDx. The prayers? Likes, shares, and retweets.
The Cancel Culture Séance
We cancel celebrities for old tweets while letting billionaires buy social networks to post worse ones. We exile public figures for one mistake while swiping right on our own hypocrisy daily. We say, "This isn’t who we are," like a country with amnesia and a burner phone.
Spoiler alert: It is who we are. But it doesn’t have to be who we stay.
Truth is the Only Exorcism That Works
So, let’s talk about truth and an exorcism that will set the ghosts free and get the bats out of the belfry.
America: the easiest thing to do is to tell the truth. The hardest thing? Looking into the mirror and telling it to ourselves.
We could solve so many problems if we just put down the mirror and looked into the reflection in each other’s eyes—and spoke truth to one another. Not slogans. Not spin. Just raw, human truth.
Because we’re not red or blue. We’re not urban or rural. We’re not just boomers, zoomers, immigrants, insiders, outsiders. We are human beings. From every corner of this earth. Living on a miracle of land, held together—barely—by stories we still believe in.
Brothers. Sisters. Citizens. Survivors. Neighbors. Wounded storytellers. Imperfect patriots.
This is still the greatest country on earth—not because we’re flawless, but because we can be honest. Because we can laugh through the pain. Because we can hold truth in one hand and a beer in the other and still make progress.
So, tell the truth. To yourself. To your neighbor. To your kid. To your ghost.
Take a bow. You’re still standing, and so is the dream - For now.
And for now, the band plays on—except the only thing they’re playing is “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.”
Chapter X: What Would Frank Do?
If you've made it this far, congratulations. You’ve survived the family ghosts, the haunted house of your own hormones, the living nightmare of social media, and the Presidential Poltergeist Parade. So now what?
Welcome to the reckoning. Not the sermon. Not the sales pitch. The reckoning.
Because in a world haunted by cowardice, corruption, and clickbait—someone has to step up, call bullshit, and lead with eyes wide open.
And if that someone were Frank?
Well… heaven help us all.
So, what would Frank do (If He Were President, CEO, or Just a Guy Sitting Next to You on the Plane)? He would:
And What Would Frank Do for Himself? He would:
Because what haunts us doesn’t have to own us; what hurt us doesn’t have to hold us; and what we’ve done, broken, or lost… can still lead to light.
Chapter XI: The Veritas Way
At Veritas, we practice an ancient art in a modern world: telling the truth. Not the polished version. Not the corporate PowerPoint version. The real kind—the kind that leaves a bruise, makes you laugh, then hands you a mirror.
We honor the truth even when it’s inconvenient, even when it’s hilarious, and especially when it shows up dressed in your old prom tuxedo, smells like regret and Old Spice, and demands to sleep on your couch for the next 30 years.
Because if you’re not willing to laugh at the ghosts in your closet… they’ll start writing your blog, hijack your slide deck, and eventually show up in your quarterly earnings call with annotated footnotes.
And trust me, Sport Fans - you do not want to be ghostwritten by a ghost.
At Veritas, truth isn’t a tagline—it’s a full-contact sport. It’s the opposite of gaslighting. It’s clarity over comfort. It’s refusing to sugarcoat the symptoms just to keep the patient smiling.
We don’t deal in spin. We don’t do performative jargon. We don’t believe that silence is safer.
We believe that clarity is compassion. That candor is currency. And that courage—the real kind—starts with saying what everyone else in the room is too afraid to say.
We write it. We say it. We publish it. We do it with spine and with style.
And yes, we laugh—because the truth is funny. It’s absurd. It’s liberating. It’s human.
We don’t pretend to be perfect. But we do promise to be honest. And in a haunted world of curated personas, fake metrics, executive ghosting, and shareholder séances—we’ll take honesty over harmony every time.
Not haunted. Not hiding. Not here to play nice.
That’s The Veritas Way.
Epilogue: The Ghosts We Gave Life To
They say you can't run from your past. What they don’t say is that sometimes you don’t have to—because it wakes up beside you every morning.
Some ghosts are real. Not the horror movie kind. The kind born screaming their first breath in hospital rooms, wrapped in possibility and your last name. The kind that once laughed at your dad jokes, ran to you with finger-painted masterpieces, and believed—truly believed—you were invincible.
The ghosts we gave life to aren’t dead. They’re just... gone. And that’s worse.
You flip through photo albums and find perfect moments. A beach trip. A birthday cake. A blurry little league game where you screamed like it was the World Series. Because back then, it was. You remember the nights in the NICU, the feedings, hundreds of diaper changes, the bedtime stories, the scraped knees, the science projects, the whispered fears, the ferocious love that tethered you to something sacred. You didn’t just witness a childhood. You built it.
Then something cracked. Maybe it happened slowly. Maybe it all shattered at once. A horrible divorce. A betrayal. A story rewritten in courtrooms and calendars, where your presence was reduced to percentages and pieces of paper.
The law called it "custody". Your children called it abandonment. Your dreams shattered before your very eyes.
You tried. Cards sent. Gifts returned. Phone calls and letters unanswered. Emails unread. You told yourself: they’ll come around. One day. When they’re older. When they see the whole picture. But the silence hardened. The years passed, and your heartache grew teeth.
It’s not just guilt. It’s grief, anguish and indescribable pain that sears your soul. It’s love with no landing place. It’s screaming “I was there” into an abyss that refuses to echo.
You replay every single mistake you made (and there were many) - every argument, every slammed door, every birthday, game or graduation you missed because someone else stepped into your place and got to hold the pen. You see their faces in strangers and hear their laughter in your dreams. They’re not memories. They’re muscle.
Some ghosts were forged by what we failed to do. Some were engineered by lies—spun by people who needed to survive their own shame. And some? We made ourselves, with flaws, fear, and a thousand micro-mistakes.
But here’s what never changed: You never stopped loving them.
You want to say: I was there, because you were. I held you when you were sick. I danced with you in the kitchen. I cried when you went to kindergarten. I stayed up at night worrying if you felt safe. I wasn’t perfect. But I was always yours.
You want to say: Alienation is a lie told long enough to sound like truth. I never left. You think I left you, but I was pushed. Pushed hard. And I waited. Every day. In case the door cracked open. I would have hoped that you would see what truly happened and would have returned, or at least returned a call, but you never did.
This isn’t a chapter about blame. It’s about reckoning. It’s about how even the most successful people in the world can still be haunted by the people who matter most.
You can be famous. You can fly jets. Win boardrooms. Be quoted in The New York Times. Be a media influencer and write a blog read by thousands. But if you lose the ones you’d die for? Absolutely none of it matters.
This is for every parent who lives inside the ache. The hours are cruel. The silence is sharp. The pain is searing. But the hope? The hope is as eternal as the flame in our heart.
You pray wisdom finds its way into your child’s heart. You pray they question the narrative. You pray they remember the laughter, the light, the love. You pray they awaken and forgive the mess.
To Joe and Pierce—my beloved twin sons, my heartbeat, the breath of my life: I never stopped being your dad. Even when the silence said otherwise. Even when the system and so many of the people around you tried to erase me. Even when the world got in the way.
I’ve loved you every second. I’ve missed you in ways language cannot hold. And if there’s a way back, I’ll take it. I’ll crawl across it. I’ll build it brick by brick with bare hands.
To anyone reading this and living through something similar: Phone home. Or, if you’re on the receiving end, answer the call. Be brave. Ask the hard questions. Hear the messy answers. Because ghosts can become human again. And broken doesn’t have to mean beyond repair.
Take a bow. You’re still haunted. But maybe not forever.
And if the phone rings one day… Answer it. Because what you’ll hear might sound like redemption.
Welcome back. I never left.
FBG (Dedicated to Tik – Even the most beautiful ghosts eventually find their way home).
**********************************************************************
PS: If this piece made you laugh, nod in agreement, or mutter “he’s talking about me behind my back, isn’t he?”—I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a line at fglassner@veritasecc.com. I personally read and reply to every message—no assistants, no AI, just me (usually with a strong espresso in hand). Whether you’re a board member, CEO, CFO, burned-out executive, investment banker, activist shareholder, client, consultant, lawyer, accountant, ex-wife, one of my beloved twin sons, AI Bot, or just a fellow traveler in the great corporate circus, I welcome the conversation.
Thanks!