Every Ghost in This City Knows My Old Name
I got sober, self-destructed my identity, ended every single one of my patterns, lost almost everyone I knew, and walked back into the same city where all of it happened. Turns out every bar, every street corner, every breakfast table, every contact in your phone can become a ghost. Here’s what it looks like when you’re the one who got away.
The Blue Room, a Diet Coke, and a City Full of Memories I Can’t Outrun
Last night I attended a comedy show at the Blue Room. When I arrived, I got a Diet Coke and walked over to the windows overlooking downtown and waited for the show to begin.
As I looked out over a very rainy downtown Railroad Ave and Holly Street, I couldn’t help but notice all of the ghosts of my former life looking up at me. They were right there in the rain-slicked reflection of the street below, looking up through the glass like they were waiting for me to come back down to them. Matthew’s Cocktail Lounge. The Beaver. The Horseshoe Bar. The many late nights on Railroad Avenue and Holly Street with some of my best friends, laughing and being obnoxiously silly in our alcohol and weed infused wildness. The times we started at the Royal Room (eww). The there-is-nothing-else-to-do visits and drinks at Rumors Cabaret. The late night munchies at Sweet as Waffles, sometimes a few hours after we started the night with a Shot Ski of tequila, and the greasy spoon delight of the Horseshoe Cafe.
The debauchery of it all felt electric back then. Like every night was the main event, and I had a front row seat to myself. Now those memories look like a snow globe I can see into but can’t reach inside of anymore. And honestly, I don’t want to. But that doesn’t mean the glass isn’t right there in front of my face every time I go downtown, showing me everything I used to be.
As I stood alone in this moment on my solo date night in the Blue Room, while people slowly filled in with their friends, grabbing drinks and making their way to their seats, I remembered the last time I was in this venue with an ice cold cocktail in my hands, with my people, having what felt like a very good time. A ghost of an experience. A whole life as a ghost, honestly, built on something that felt like joy but was really just noise I used to drown out the silence.
The Ghost Who Used to Go by Matthew
When I used to be called Matthew, it felt fun and appropriate to start my night in his cocktail lounge. It fit. I was that guy. Loud, performative, buying rounds, making people laugh, running from himself with extraordinary efficiency. Now when I cross paths with the owner in town, I am a ghost to him. Not even an acknowledgment of my existence, or of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of dollars I spent keeping his business alive and myself and my ghosts comfortably numbed.
He is a ghost to me now. As are all of the people I once knew who still start their nights off there, still sipping the same drinks in the same spots, still running the same laps. I don’t hold it against any of them. Genuinely. Ghosts don’t know they’re haunting the place. That’s kind of the whole goddamn point about ghosts. They just keep doing what they always did, in the places they always were, completely unaware that the person they used to haunt has quietly left the building.
This Whole City Is a Fucking Haunted House
When I first moved to Bellingham, I used to walk downtown with my coworkers to the same spot for coffee. It was a Starbucks back then. And when that Starbucks closed down, you know what moved in? Matthew’s Cocktail Lounge. The universe apparently has a sense of humor, because the place I used to go to get caffeine became the place I used to go to get obliterated. A coffee shop became a bar, and the same guy who used to walk in every morning for caffeine started walking in every night as Matthew, running from something he hadn’t faced yet, numbing himself in the exact same building where he used to just be trying to wake up. A ghost of my past, turned into a new friend, and then into another ghost. The whole arc of it is almost too on the nose.
When I walk further up the street past the Co-Op, I look through the windows and remember all the hash brown casserole I ate every morning with one of my coworkers. Both of them are now ghosts. And further up the street, the place I landed my first big IT job and met some of the most amazing people: the entire building, the badge I used to swipe, the desk I used to sit at, and almost everyone I once knew there. All of it. Ghosts.
Downtown is fucking filled with them. It doesn’t matter what street I am on or where I look. First dates and first kisses, all vapors in the misty air. There is no block in this city that doesn’t have something echoing at me if I let it.
Amendment 21, and just across the street, what was known as the Happy Place. I haven’t been in either of those places in years. They are both now ghosts of the dark night. Those two spots were my go-to’s on many nights. The circuit was almost ritualistic: I usually began with a Black Russian at Amendment 21, went to the Buff for an EDM show, and when that ended, over to the Happy Place for the after party and more of everything. That whole circuit, soup to nuts, a ghost. A well-worn groove in the city that I used to run like a track, every week, thinking I was living when I was mostly just moving fast enough that I couldn’t feel how hollow I was.
94 Shows.
Every Single One of Them High.
The Buff.
The Buff.
In a two-year span of time, I attended 94 shows at the Wild Buffalo House of Music, high on drugs and alcohol every single time. And the Buff was just one of several venues I frequented. The bartenders knew me by name. So did the drug dealers. So did the police. So did the St. Joe’s ER and psych-ward staff. I was a frequent flyer everywhere that mattered for all the wrong reasons, and somehow I convinced myself that being known was the same as being loved. It isn’t. I know that now.
The staff at the Buff has barely changed over the last five years, and that familiarity is its own kind of ghost. The bouncer at the door, who unknowingly and excitedly told me one night that a ghost was inside waiting for me, now looks at a guy who once came to that same door alone and on drugs. A ghost of my past, now sober, and alone again. I can walk in now and not see ghosts immediately, but they are still all around everywhere I look.
The bartenders who used to see me walk in and come outside of the bar to give me a hug, ask me if I wanted my usual cocktail, and invite me to private gatherings outside of the Buff, well, now I am lucky to get a smile and a nod when I order a Diet Coke. That’s not a complaint. It’s just a measurement. The warmth I used to receive in those spaces was inseparable from the person I was performing in them. Strip away the performance and the substances that fueled it, and you find out pretty quickly what was real and what was just the reflection of your own chaos bouncing back at you dressed up as connection.
The spot at the bar where I used to sit and wait for the show to begin, it’s not mine anymore. Often there are other ghosts from my past sitting there, watching the ghost I am to them now. When I go to EDM shows these days, I see all kinds of ghosts from my partying days, drinking and on drugs, and they barely pay me a notice. I’m a ghost to them just as much as they are to me. We move through the same physical space like two different dimensions occupying the same room, close enough to touch but completely unreachable to each other.
The “I love you more” sign in the alley is a ghost now too. The days I was smoking weed in front of it, taking selfies with it in the background with someone I was deeply in love with, someone whose hands I knew and whose laugh I can still hear if I let myself. That was real. The love was real. The person I was showing up as, the version of me who thought he could love someone well while actively destroying himself, that guy was the ghost. He just hadn’t figured that out yet. The sign is still there. The love it promised is still somewhere in me. I just had to learn how to stop directing it exclusively outward and leaving absolutely nothing in the tank for myself.
Walking Home Alone Through a City That Remembers Everything
When I walk home after an evening downtown, I no longer walk with a group of people that slowly peel off in the direction of their homes before I get to mine. I walk home alone down Cornwall or Commercial Street, past all the things one of my ghosts used to pose on sexually and give us photo after photo of him being silly and free.
The debauchery. The Halloween night I dressed as a slutty ghost, and I mean that literally, in a sheer white drape that hid nothing, a black g-string, a garter belt, and lace-topped thigh high stockings, six-foot-something of absolutely unhinged energy barely covered in lingerie that left very little to the imagination and absolutely nothing to chance. It was erotic in the most deliberately chaotic way, and I knew exactly what I was doing. The dopamine hit of being a big tall guy in lingerie walking down Railroad Avenue while people’s heads turned and mouths opened and comments flew. I lived for that. I wore it for me, sure, but mostly I wore it because it was impossible to ignore, and being impossible to ignore was the closest thing I had to feeling real. Another performance. Another costume inside the costume. It was 34 degrees outside with wind chill in the low twenties, and I drank enough that I never got cold. Somehow. The laughter. The shared experiences. All of it, just ghosts I walk by every time I go downtown.
The Apartment That Used to Have a Pulse
When I get home, I walk into an apartment full of ghosts.
Puppies that greeted us when we opened the door, missing. Furniture in the living room, gone, relocated to someone else’s life. A bed I used to share cuddles with every night, empty in a way that isn’t just physical. It’s the absence of warmth, of weight, of breathing that isn’t mine. The tender moments and the intimate ones in my room, replaced the hum of the refrigerator running in the background. It’s a particular kind of quiet that isn’t peaceful. It’s the quiet of something that used to be full and now isn’t, and every room knows it.
The one and only big argument we ever had, still hanging out silently in the kitchen like it never left. The breakup at the table by the heater in the living room, a haunting ghost I can feel in my chest every time I sit near it. And the table itself, gone and yet another ghost, held the shape of the moment that ended everything like a piece of furniture that somehow remembers more than it should. Some objects absorb what happens near them. That table absorbed all of it. The ghost of it is now in someone else’s kitchen.
My Phone Is a Ghost Town and I Have the Receipts
When I open my phone in the morning, the contacts aren’t the same. The pinned texts at the top have different names and thumbnails. The ones I used to love seeing a new notification from, ghosts. Little green dots that used to feel like warm light. Now they’re just pixels for different people, some of whom I hadn’t even met yet when those older conversations were alive.
The blocked list has grown enormously and is covered in them. Every block is its own ghost story: a person, a pattern, a dynamic that I finally looked at clearly and said no more. The messages I sent in the past several months that never got replied to, more ghosts. Not just unanswered texts but evidence of the slow fade, the way people disappear without saying a word and leave you holding the last message like a question with no answer coming. The friends and family who vanished without explanation, ghosts. The silence they left behind louder than anything they ever said.
The Table for One at Diamond Jim’s
On the weekends when I go to Diamond Jim’s for breakfast, they still recognize me, but they no longer ask if someone else is joining me. They’ve learned. They see the ghost that used to sit at the table with me and they just bring the single cup of coffee without asking. I eat alone with my earbuds in because there is no one to talk to over eggs and bacon. There are three empty chairs at a table of four, and if you looked closely, you could probably see the impressions of everyone who used to sit in them, still warm from people who are no longer there.
It’s a small thing, a breakfast table. But grief doesn’t only live in the dramatic moments. It lives in the table for four that is now a table for one. It lives in the coffee cup. It lives in the moment the server stops asking. The small moments of absence are sometimes the ones that hit the hardest, because you can’t prepare for them. They just find you over eggs and bacon on a Saturday morning with your earbuds in.
The Ghost of the Father I Should Have Been Sooner
And then there’s the ghost of the father I used to be.
The estrangement from my daughters is a wound that doesn’t announce itself loudly, but it never really goes quiet either. It lives in the walls of rooms I haven’t shared with them. It lives in the birthdays that passed in silence, in the milestones I watched from a distance or missed entirely. The version of me they knew before the worst of it, before the psych ward, before the wreckage, before the man they called dad disappeared into something unrecognizable, that guy haunts me more than any bar or any street corner ever could. Those ghosts have faces I love. That makes them the hardest ones to sit with.
I don’t get to go back and be the father I should have been during those years. That version of events is sealed. It is a ghost I have to carry. What I can do, and what I am doing, is show up now as someone worth knowing. Reconnecting has been sacred and slow and something I hold with both hands, careful not to grip too tight. The years that are gone don’t come back. They just become part of the ghost story. And I am choosing to write a different ending to it, even if the earlier chapters are already printed and I can’t change a single word of them.
Gray. Flat. Gone.
The Ghost Before the VNS.
There is another ghost that doesn’t get talked about enough, and that is the ghost of the guy who could barely lift his head off the pillow.
Before my vagus nerve stimulator, I was flat. Not sad exactly. Just gray. The volume knob on life turned all the way down and nothing, no person, no substance, no experience, able to turn it back up. I was sleeping 15 to 16 hours a day. Bathing twice a month. Dishes stacked up in the sink for weeks. Laundry in piles on the floor that became part of the permanent landscape of a life that had essentially stopped moving. Somehow still holding a job and paying rent, which is its own absurd kind of ghost story: a person technically functioning while being almost entirely absent from their own life. A ghost haunting himself.
Six psychiatric medications, several at or near the highest doses. They dulled everything. Numbed everything. The glimmer in my eyes, completely gone. I wasn’t stoned in the photos from that time. I was flat. There is a difference, and it is devastating to look at now.
A Facebook ad for a clinical trial with a European pharmaceutical company changed the direction of everything. I signed up for their VNS research trial not because I had hope exactly, but because hope-adjacent was the best I could scrape together, and it was just enough to keep me moving forward through the procedures and appointments. Then I started noticing something shifting in the right direction. Little by little. Not magic, not instant. Just a slow, deliberate reintroduction to my own nervous system, like turning a dial a fraction of a degree at a time over the course of months, and then years.
The guy who lived in that gray flatness is a ghost now too. I don’t miss him, but I carry a hell of a lot of compassion for him. He was doing the absolute best he could with a brain that was working against him at every level. He deserved better than he got. And he finally got it.
Performing Goodness Isn’t the Same as Being Good.
AKA Operation Water Drop.
Here is one that took me a while to be honest about.
Operation Water Drop. The volunteerism. The public speaking. The showing up and being seen doing good things in the community. All of it genuine in its intent, and I want to be absolutely clear about that. The thought behind every water drop delivery, every speech, every hour of service was real. I wasn’t manipulating anyone. I wasn’t running a con. The people who received help were helped. The impact was real.
But if I am being fully honest, which is the only thing this blog has ever been, a significant part of what I was doing out there in the world was performing goodness to fill a hole inside me that I didn’t know how to fill any other way. I wanted to feel like a good person. I wanted to be seen as one. I was silently dead inside and I was using visible acts of service as a way to paper over that, to manufacture evidence that I was worth something when the actual evidence I needed was never going to come from the outside, no matter how many gallons of water I handed out or how many times I got applause from a crowd.
The helping mattered. The people who got water, who got a peer supporter, who heard something in a speech that cracked something open in them, all of that mattered and I stand behind every bit of it. But the why behind it was tangled up in ways I had to get honest about. I was racking up good deeds the way other people rack up substances, chasing the feeling of being enough, of being seen, of having something to show for myself so the silence inside wouldn’t be so goddamn loud. That is its own kind of addiction. Quieter. More socially acceptable. Harder to see. But just as hollow at the root.
The guy who needed to perform his worth for the world to validate it? Ghost. The guy who shows up now because he genuinely wants to, because love is actually the operating system and not a costume he’s wearing? That guy is still learning. But he’s real.
25 Years in IT, a Five-Minute Phone Call, and a Veteran Community That Refused to Stay a Ghost
Last July I walked away from a 25-year career in IT.
It didn’t end gently. In the span of five bizarre minutes on a late Thursday afternoon phone call, my integrity, ethics, and values were questioned. I was being unfairly judged and falsely accused. I hung up, sat with it for two days, then walked into the office on a Sunday, signed in one last time, sent an immediate resignation letter, and left my badge, laptop, backpack, and tools behind. I walked out of a building I had worked hard to get into and never looked back.
That moment, and the 25 years behind it, a ghost.
The guy who showed up at Growing Veterans for the first time after leaving that job, no title, no cocktail, no performance, just a person walking into a room full of strangers trying to figure out who the hell he was without the career he had used to define himself, that guy was raw in a way that is hard to describe. He chose community not because he had it all together but because showing up was the one thing he could still do when everything else had fallen out from under him. And he kept showing up. Every single week he could. Through the relationship ending. Through the identity dissolving. Through the sobriety beginning. Through the medication changes and the grief work and the ego death and the long dark months of figuring out who the hell he actually was underneath all the wreckage. He didn’t stop. Growing Veterans became the one consistent anchor in a year that had almost nothing consistent in it, and that matters in a way that is hard to overstate.
The veteran community itself was a ghost for almost twenty years. I walked away from it when I left the Air Force and I didn’t look back. Almost two decades of that part of myself just sitting in a drawer somewhere, dusty and unclaimed, like a piece of identity I had decided I no longer needed. It isn’t a ghost anymore. Those people are alive and walking alongside me now, and that is one of the few things from this entire brutal year that I can point to and say without hesitation: that was the right call. That community is real. I’m not a ghost there. I’m a person.
That guy who showed up last July and the one who walks in there this morning are not the same person. They share a name now but not much else. The ghost of the exhausted, falsely accused, self-medicating IT career guy, the one who wore his competence like armor because he had nothing else and didn’t know it, he still walks those hallways in my memory sometimes. I see him. I understand him. I don’t need to be him anymore.
Every Trail Has a Ghost on It.
Every Summit.
Every Campfire.
The hikes this year on the trails I love will have ghosts around every corner, waving at me as I trek by. The mountain peaks will be filled with views that I used to share and now take in alone, the distance where other people used to stand now just empty air and treeline and silence that doesn’t answer back.
And Miss Dragonhawk, the adventure wagon, the off-road beast that took us to places Google Maps had never heard of, that got muddy and scraped and rattled down forest service roads at weird hours in search of the right campsite. She’s a ghost being driven by someone else now, parked in someone else’s driveway. That rig wasn’t just a vehicle. She was a whole chapter of my life. The physical manifestation of freedom and spontaneity and the absolute refusal to stay put. I put her through things that a sensible person would never do to a rig they actually cared about. I loved her the way you love something that will carry you anywhere without asking questions. Now the passenger seat of whatever I’m driving is empty, and that empty seat is a ghost of every person who ever filled it on a road that went somewhere worth going.
The three-man tent I will be pitching when camping season arrives will have a ghost sleeping next to me. I will zip the door behind me and feel the extra space that wasn’t always extra. There will only be one shadow created by the light of the campfire at night, and that light will pierce right through the ghosts sitting around it, falling short of faces that aren’t there to receive it.
I used to think adventure was something that needed witnesses to count. Someone else’s eyes to make it real, someone else’s amazement to confirm that what I was seeing was actually worth seeing. I’m slowly learning that the mountain doesn’t care who I brought. It just stands there, patient and enormous and completely indifferent to my grief, and lets me figure it out.
The Whole Damn Inventory
It doesn’t really matter where I go or what I do. There are ghosts everywhere I look and following me everywhere I go. In physical life and inside my head. They are not dramatic, movie-style hauntings with chains and cold spots and flickering lights. They are just the everyday archaeology of a life that changed. Everywhere you dig, you find something that used to be something else.
The guy I once knew, a ghost in my mind. The alcohol and drugs that used to pump through my body for decades, ghosts. The shrooms. The kratom. The weed. The cigarettes. All of it, ghosts. The toxic patterns I used to live in and the personas I used to perform for everyone, ghosts. The love and attention I used to get from being someone I wasn’t at the core, ghosts. The deeply rooted self-hatred, hollowness, and loneliness I used to feel, the kind of loneliness that doesn’t go away just because you’re surrounded by people, the kind that sits right in the middle of your chest at a crowded party and smiles when someone looks your way, ghosts. The guy who gave away all of his love without keeping any for himself, who poured and poured until the vessel was completely empty and then wondered why nothing worked, a ghost.
My life as a whole, before November 2025, is the mother of all of the ghosts surrounding me.
They Don’t Recognize Me.
Good.
I recognize these ghosts, but the ghosts no longer recognize me. I’ve become completely unrecognizable to them.
That’s not an accident. That’s not a loss. That is the whole fucking point.
These ghosts are still living in their old patterns. Hanging out at the same old places, walking the same paths of destruction, numbing themselves, following me around, begging for my attention, trying to get me to come back to them. They are like voices calling out from rooms I no longer live in, assuming I can still hear them because the rooms are still standing.
I can hear them.
I’m not going back.
The ghosts of nervous system dysregulation and trauma are begging me to take away their pain with dopamine, drugs, and alcohol. They knock on the door at odd hours. They make themselves comfortable in my 3am thoughts. They show up in familiar smells and songs and intersections and the particular quality of light on a rainy night on Railroad Avenue.
I’m not opening the door.
The ghosts of people-pleasing, rescuing, avoiding, rebounding, boundary-hating, fears of abandonment, fears of rejection, fears of losing love, insecure attachment, unmanaged mental health, attention seeking, acknowledgment seeking, blame-shifting, unaccountability, impulsivity, compulsivity, performing for love, and shame, all of them standing outside in a crowd, holding signs, begging me to come back to the life that almost killed me.
I’m not.
Because I Love Myself.
Period.
Because I love myself enough to see them for what they are.
Ghosts.
I love myself enough to let go of the attachment I once had to all of these ghosts lurking in the shadows, dancing right behind me, whispering familiar things in familiar voices, doing that thing where the familiar tries to convince you it’s the same as safe. It would be easy to go back. Easy is actually a pretty good word for why people do go back. The familiar is easy even when it’s destroying you, because at least you know the shape of the destruction. You know how it fits. You know where it hurts before it hurts.
I know how it fits. I am choosing something that doesn’t.
I can’t ever be unaware of the ghosts in my life now, but I can be aware of what is alive inside me. And what is alive inside me is simply love. Not the performing kind. Not the desperate, people-pleasing, please-don’t-leave kind. Not the kind that sacrifices itself completely in order to be wanted. Just love. The kind that is steady and quiet and doesn’t need to announce itself to the room.
Will there be new ghosts as I roam this earth and move through life? Of course. Every meaningful thing eventually becomes a ghost of itself. Every chapter ends. Every person changes. Every version of love shifts into a memory of what love once was. I am not under any illusion that I am done accumulating ghosts. I’m just done letting them drive.
Every heartbeat, every decision, every connection, every moment of my life moving forward is only about love now. And ghosts created only from a place of true love for myself and others aren’t bad ones to have around. Those I can live with. Those I can welcome.
A Note To All of the Ghosts
To the ghosts of the past, I have always been love, but I didn’t know how to live it and share it in the right ways. I understand that now. I’m sorry it took this long.
To all the ghosts of the present, and yet-to-come, know that I am love today, and moving forward, in everything I do.
The ghosts can keep the name Matthew. They can keep the bar stool, the cocktail lounge, the snow globe version of the life I used to live. They can haunt those places forever if they want to.
I have a different name now. I have a different life. I walked out of the haunted house and I kept walking until I couldn’t see it anymore, and then I kept walking after that.
I am Tukayote.
I am unrecognizable.
