The Cost of Greatness Series: ACT 2

Ghosts

The things that don’t leave, linger. Even after the door is shut, the house sold, divorce inked, name blocked, and the silence stretches long enough to call it peace. Ghosts don’t ask if they can stay. They live in muscle memory, in the back of your throat, in the split-second pause before you say “I’m fine” even when you’re not.

You think you’ve let go. Run away. But then, a season, a song, a smell, a photo, a certain kind of laughter resurrects a version of you that you swore was dead. The lover. The giver. The caretaker. The apologizer. The one who stayed. You wonder if healing means forgetting, but not everything that’s gone stays gone. Some things haunt and hunt because they were never fully named or mourned.

Some ghosts don’t haunt—they hold. And letting them go feels like betrayal.

There are people we lose who never truly saw us, and yet their absence echoes because we shaped ourselves around their shadows. The grief isn’t for who they were, but for who we hoped they could be. That hope has to die too.

Grief

Grief doesn’t always show up in black clothes at funerals or on the sofa with a bucket of ice cream. As I wrote this post, I thought about the four storage units we filled after losing our home. One was sold in the chaos. Nearly two years later, when I returned to clear out what was left and prepare to move into a new space, some place I could dare to call “home”, I was hit with a grief I didn’t expect. Not just for the objects, but for the life they once held. The artwork we carefully chose and placed. The furniture that cradled us. The holiday décor that made the house feel magical. The unique pots and pans we used to cook meals that held us together. Flower pots. Garden tools. Exercise equipment. Closets full of clothes and the everyday accessories that made the space ours. I realized the home I once admired no longer existed. And maybe more painfully, neither did the people who lived there. Everyone went their separate ways, chasing whatever version of peace or survival they needed to find.

I had already given away so much. So, I gave away more. Sold what I could. And my plants died in the crossfire. Some, I’d nurtured from fragile stems into six-foot monuments of resilience. They were my sanctuary, my breath when I couldn’t catch one, my quiet companions. They had names. They had personalities. They sang their own soft songs. Their death felt final. And in many ways, it was. But the grief lingers on.

Grief can show up in the old texts you’ll never respond to, in numbers you memorized but deleted, and in roles you played to survive: the fixer, the forgiver, the favorite. Grief comforts the version of you that made excuses for everything and everyone. That version did her job – she got you through – but she cannot lead you where you’re going.

She wasn’t built for freedom, only survival.

We grieve the self who tolerated harm in the name of peace, but eventually acknowledged that peace built on suppression, is war by another name. Even our comforts grieve us. The routine, the religion, the rules we follow without question. The lie we cling to: at least I know what to expect here. We grieve those comforts not because they were true, but because they were familiar. And familiarity, even when it’s killing you slowly, is addictive.

Burials

In order to step into freedom, something has to die. That’s the part no one talks about. The messy middle. The space between who you were and who you’re becoming. It’s where you find yourself missing people who hurt you, mourning roles and identities that once made you feel safe, and quietly wondering if liberation is just loneliness dressed up in purpose.

This is the first burial. The first real goodbye.

You can’t talk about freedom without talking about loss.

When I was eight years old, we buried my father. Lupus took his body, but the sky—wide and blindingly bright—felt like it took his spirit. He was the brightest light I’d ever known. I remember standing at the burial site, staring down into the hole they had dug for his casket, and thinking: He can’t leave without me. And I can’t stay without him. I tried to step forward, into the dirt with him. I was a child who didn’t yet understand the shape of grief.

It took years to realize what I couldn’t make sense of then. That my father was in pain, not just from the disease, but from the emotional and spiritual weight he carried. And in order for him to be free in whatever came next, he had to be released from what kept him here.

That was my first understanding of burial, not just as a physical act, but as an emotional and spiritual turning point. The moment we accept that something—or someone—can’t come with us. That no matter how much we love them, or how much they once loved us, holding on will only hold us back.

I miss him every day.

Burial, in the context of this post, is about making peace with what has ended. It’s recognizing that to move forward, to truly live, we have to bury what no longer serves us. Not to forget it, but to honor it. To say: This mattered. This shaped me. And now, I’m letting it go.

Freedom is costly. It asks you to lay something down before you pick yourself back up. And sometimes, what we’re laying down is a version of ourselves we thought would last forever.

Memory

Memory is not loyal to the healed version of you. It’s a back-stabbing archive that doesn’t ask permission. It shows up, smiling and unannounced, dragging all the stories you swore you buried. Memory doesn’t care if you’ve moved on; it brings the whole damn past with it, fully dressed, smelling like the house you ran from and burned down.

Even after you’ve burned the bridge and scattered the ashes, memory walks across water like nothing ever happened. And that’s the cruel part: you can be free and still haunted. You can cut the cords and still feel the static. Memory is stitched into the nervous system, not just the brain. And it isn’t logical—it’s sensory, emotional, and embodied.

Warning: Healing can make you homesick for the very things that hurt you.

Memory records us but doesn’t rule us. It holds what was—but it doesn’t get to decide what is. You can honor the truth of your past without living inside it. And you can carry the lesson without reliving the wound.

Still, it’s not undeviating. Some days you’ll feel clean. Other days, memory will drag mud across your progress and call it “just checking in.” And when that happens, don’t shame yourself for remembering. You survived by remembering where the pain lived. By anticipating danger. By reading every room like it could turn on you. That was intelligence. That was protection.

But you’re not in that room anymore.

So when memory shows up, you get to speak back. You get to remind it: We’re not there. We’re not that. We made it out. You don’t have to forget to be free. You just have to stop bowing to the altar of what broke you.

Freedom

No one tells you that freedom has a body count. That in the process of reclaiming yourself, you will lose people you once begged to stay. You will bury versions of yourself that kept you alive in rooms where your spirit couldn’t breathe. You will outgrow comforts that felt like safe havens, but were really just cages with soft pillows.

Freedom isn’t always a beginning. It’s often an ending in disguise.

And before freedom can take root, the ghosts must be called out. Not to banish them—but to witness them. To say: Yes, you were real. Yes, you shaped me. But no, you don’t get to drive anymore.

Freedom anchors itself in the quiet, difficult decisions we make to maintain boundaries with our past. And it’s not the absence of pain; it’s the presence of choice. The choice to let go with love. To honor where we’ve been without letting it dictate where we’re going. The choice to breathe through the ache, stay present through the triggers, and keep walking anyway. The choice to move forward, even while carrying pieces of what was. The choice to believe that what’s ahead is still worth showing up for, despite what it’s cost you.

Freedom isn’t a single act. It is a living practice that asks us again and again: What are you still carrying that’s not yours to hold anymore?

Let this season of grief do what it came to do—break the old agreements, loosen your grip, make room. Let it be the soil, not the sentence. Let it remind you that memory isn’t your master, and pain isn’t your purpose. You don’t have to carry everything to prove it mattered. Some ghosts need a witness, not a war. Name them. Thank them. And then let them go. You’ve spent enough time surviving rooms that tried to smother your fire. This is about choosing you, again and again, even while you’re still pushing through.

You’ve laid so much to rest. Now it’s your turn to rise.

Not just alive, but free.