From The Memory Box: Boots and Ghosts

As a duly designated representative of the City, County and State of New York, I order you to cease any and all supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin or to the nearest convenient parallel dimension. --Dr. Raymond Stantz, Ghostbusters

“I want to talk about my relationship with my estranged sister.”

When Regan (name changed) heard about Memory Boxes, she immediately knew what story she wanted to tell.

What happens when the person you look up to starts talking down to you?

Regan is in her forties, bounces back and forth between Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, pays the bills by professionally managing video game fan communities, and is currently being haunted by the ghost of her very-much-alive estranged sister. That isn’t what she said, but it’s where we got to after an hour of narrative discovery.

What she said was, “I have this voice in my head. It’s my sister’s voice. And it will start screaming at me, telling me about all the things I’m doing wrong and how it’s a pity I wasn’t raised to know any better.” High stakes things like... pouring the tea, apparently. As insults go, these are impressive. Attacking someone’s execution and breeding all at once, while insinuating all their failures can’t be helped, and then piling on some false pity for good measure. Wow.

Regan’s sister, Denise, is much older. About eight years older. And when you’re a kid, and your parents are divorced, and your family situation is tenuous and fragile, a sister with an extra eight years of age and experience can be a lifeline.

Taken out of context, it’s almost comical. Denise isn’t calling. She isn’t texting. If she really wanted to cause problems for Regan, she’d do it. And yet Regan is haunted anyway. Denise has sent a little spectral emissary to do her dirty work. But this is Regan’s real life, and she’s hearing all this from the voice of someone she has looked up to. Someone she has admired. Someone whose approval she has chased her whole life. And it’s in her head saying, “I don’t approve and I never will.” Over and over.

Regan was talking to me because she had a story to tell and she didn’t know how to tell it. She knew what happened. She knew the major events. She knew all the little details that made her story hers alone. She knew all of this backwards and forwards because she’d lived it, one irate inner voice at a time. And as I was listening to her, I could feel a story underneath it all.

Narrative is about cause and effect. If storytelling is a way of organizing facts so that they relate to each other and lead to a logical conclusion, then narrative is the structure off which all those facts hang. It’s the difference between storing your clothes on hangers or in a heap in the bottom of your closet. When you find the right narrative for your life, you can start to understand the system of the world and your place in it.

The thing is, it’s pretty tough to see the story you’re in when you’re in the middle of it. It’s a can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees situation, except the forest is your life and there are more than just trees. Birds, shrubs, poison ivy, streams, rocks, paths, all of it. Life keeps happening while you’re trying to get your head around it. If you really want to see the shape of the whole forest, you want to be 20,000 feet up, not stuck in the middle swatting mosquitoes while you’re trying to pitch a tent and get a fire going.

So Regan, busy trying to get through a day with her sister’s voice megaphoned straight into her brain, isn’t in the best position to see a narrative in her life. But I’m a few hundred miles away, and I’ve never met Regan’s sister, so I’m well-positioned to take a crack at sorting all this out.

The problem with an inner voice is that no one else hears it. Whatever it has to say is for your ears alone. Whatever nonsense it spouts doesn’t get critiqued, doesn’t have to pass peer review, and doesn’t have to compete with the jackhammers outside your window just to be heard.

And in my experience, there’s no real way to settle the argument either. There’s no reasoning with an inner critic. It’s never going to admit it’s wrong. You can’t put tape over its mouth. You can’t throw it out of the house. You can’t send it home in an ambulance with its teeth unceremoniously potato-cannoned into its colon (I’ve tried). It’s just there and it won’t shut up and it won’t leave.

And as I’m listening to Regan explain all of this, the structure I see is a haunting. Repeated visits by an unwelcome guest.

“That’s exactly what it feels like!” When Regan said this, I could see her sit up a little straighter. That was the moment when Regan understood the story she was in. And once you know what trope you’re in the middle of, you can start to explore some options.

Do I believe in ghosts? No. Does Regan? Not a clue. Is a haunting a useful allegorical shorthand for the experience of having an obnoxious inner critic that won’t shut up? Oh, is it ever.

Thus, my next question:

“How does one exorcise a ghost?”

Regan, a veteran of the video game industry, i.e. the industry of interactive storytelling, was more than ready to engage with this mental exercise. And she’s watched more horror movies than I have, which is to say, “she has watched horror movies” so she had some answers.

Ghosts, she explained, hang around when there’s unfinished business to be dealt with. Ghosts are a symbol of unfinished business. To get rid of a ghost, you pacify the spirit, and you do that by untangling whatever issues are keeping it up at night. Insofar as ghosts are harmful, it’s generally a representation of damage being done by the tension they represent. Solve the problem, get rid of the ghosts.

This distinguishes them from demons -- we agreed -- because demons are evil spirits hellbent on power. Exorcising a demon is an act of banishment. A power struggle. And that’s when the crucifixes come out and the green slime goes everywhere.

What followed was a lengthy discussion about ghosts, demons, the difference between the two, and how one might banish either of them. My notes from this section say “Go watch The Exorcist” because I’ve never seen it, and Regan was drawing from it heavily.

You can make anything look like black magic if your handwriting is bad enough.

Up to this point in the conversation, we’d been talking about the problem but not about the story that got Regan to where she is: estranged from her sister and hearing a voice in her head. It’s up to my clients to decide what they want to share. I invite, but I don’t push. And then, towards the end of our session, Regan said the magic words: “I feel like I should tell you about the event that finally broke us up.”

This is the story she told me.

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My sister is a single mom, and she’s got a son who graduated high school recently. He’s a great kid. I’m so proud of him. So I flew out to see him graduate.

The morning of graduation, we were getting ready to go, and my sister made a comment about my shoes. And at first I thought it was a compliment. “Nice boots.”

And then she wouldn’t stop talking about the boots. “You’re wearing those?” “Those look like they’re for hiking.” “Are you sure you wouldn’t be more comfortable in something else?”

So I offered to change into other shoes.

“No, it’s fine. We need to leave.”

So we piled in the car and started driving. And she wouldn’t stop talking about the boots. And finally, I said, “Look. You have two choices. We can either go back, and I will change my shoes, or we can keep going. But either way, you need to stop talking about this.”

We ended up going back for my other shoes, I changed, and she still didn’t let up. And finally, we lost it with each other, and I haven’t spoken to her since.

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Fair enough, I wouldn’t either.

Regan was pretty clear on how ghosts work. Ghosts crop up when there’s unfinished business. When something matters so much that it lingers after everything else ends, that’s when you get ghosts. And Denise is getting that worked up over boots? This is, frankly, absurd. I’m sure Denise has her own issues, I’m sure she’s carrying a bunch of psychic weight about her childhood and her role in Regan’s life, but Denise isn’t my client. Regan is. Regan is doing her level best to be the bigger person in this relationship. More power to her. I’m not Regan, and I’ve got a petty streak a mile wide. So I indulged myself a bit with her memory box:

I asked Regan for details about the boots in question. They’re nice boots. Beautiful leather Chelsea boots with meticulous top stitching. This ghost needs a better hill to die on. And fortunately, Regan agreed when she saw it.

“Haahahaha!! Oh my gosh, I love this Hallie!!! Not only does it capture the way the memory of this situation clings, but it's playful in a way I very much needed to remember to be kind, and maybe not take these voices that come up so seriously.”

The thing about inner critics is that it’s useless to argue with them. And worse, by doing so, you legitimize them. You’re getting into an unwinnable fight and strengthening the enemy all at once. There is no greater compliment you can pay to an opponent than to take them seriously as a threat. But you can take them down a few pegs. Destroy their image. Turn them into a mockery. Pretend they’re a silly little ghost with an irrational boot phobia. If there’s a lesson here, it’s that not every inner voice deserves your attention or respect.

And don’t let a silly little ghost or two get in the way of a good pair of boots.

I have three spots open for Memory Box commissions. If you want to discover your own story and have me tell it through drawings or have me call bullshit on the tedious concerns of whatever specters are haunting you, email me.

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