In Search of a Chiang Mai Ghost
Somewhere, somehow, I know she’s still here.
This is the latest of many personal dispatches on culture, healing, and spirituality from a dual Canadian-American living in Thailand. Find popular free essays here and access to the rest of Sober Soulful (including the Sobriety Series) by upgrading here:
Since moving to Chiang Mai this past June, I’ve found myself searching for something—for anything, really—that I recognize from two decades ago, when I wandered these streets in my twenties.
The essence of us is the same, after all—the spirit of me and this city. But so much has shifted, so much feels different, that I can’t help but question: I was here, right? And that life led to this one? That version of me became who I am now?
Desperate for evidence, determined to locate the proof, I scan my surroundings. I’m hypervigilant yet disorientated. I’m awash in deja vu, or in a dream state, or trying to remember a dream. But whatever I’m looking for, whatever I’m grasping, eludes me. I can almost orient myself, I can almost locate its source, I almost have it. Except, it’s just out of reach.
In an effort to make sense—in an effort to give what’s elusive substance and weight—I consider what I’m hoping to find.
Perhaps the traditional teak house where I learned yoga and fell madly in love with my teacher. Or the wine bar where, after yoga, I gulped down my sorrow. Or maybe the miniature home I rented on a tucked-away lane. Or the rhythmic chanting of the older man down the street. Or the woman one street over who hand washed my laundry.
Perhaps, if I peer through the commotion in a busier part of town, I’ll spot the Italian restaurant where I dined alone at a small table for two. And where I watched another woman—a few decades my senior—dine at another table, pushed against the opposite wall. And where I emptied my wine glass just a little too fast while watching her empty hers faster until, finally and inevitably, she passed out. No efforts to hide, no pride to defend, head slumped on table.
Most times I ate there, the scene was the same: two foreign women eating alone against opposite walls, me drinking while watching her drinking, everyone pretending not to notice as she finished her meal and slipped into darkness. How tragic, I’d think. How shameful, I’d judge. Sitting there, eyes full of tears, an earlier version of exactly the same.
Or maybe, if I venture down the right street, I’ll find the makeshift shophouse where an amused barber shaved my head for cents on the dollar. And where, to explain the look I was after, I’d point to novice monks with their buzzed heads and beautiful skin and bright orange robes.
Or the nearby sauna, where I’d sip herbal tea and rub thick yellow paste on my face and limbs. Or the smokey pad Thai stall across the way. The place where the self-styled tai chi guru—an American—finally spotted me. After months of evading him. After our affair ended in dangerous, dramatic disaster.
After weeks of this—weeks of looking for something to connect my past with my present—I finally figured it out. I at last understood that it wasn’t a familiar person or place I was seeking. It was a younger, twenty-something ghost of myself.
Some part of me is pursuing her. Some part of me is hoping for even a glimpse around every bend. And while others may have forgotten that version, I can still sense her spirit. I am drawn to her, I want to find her and be her.
Not fully. Not in a way that requires slipping back into the deep well of loneliness and profound despair and utter chaos I courted back then. More, I think, I want to recapture the feeling that a whole world awaits, that decades remain for sorting things out, that I have no idea what lies ahead, but this is a time to leave life up to chance.
And yet, with that, I also want to lift her out of the darkness. I want to drop in from the future, draw her close, look in her eyes, and whisper, “It’s okay. You’ll be okay.”
I want to tell her, “You won’t believe it, Sunshine, how good things will get. How things will change and how you will change. You won’t believe it, the adventures you’ll have and the hardships ahead and how you’ll move through them. How you’ll not only survive, but find peace and joy and love and contentment. Or how you’ll wander these exact streets two decades from now. You’ll be a Chinese Medicine doctor then, and sober, and best friends with your partner. I can’t wait for you to meet your impossibly spoiled, absolutely neurotic Siamese cats. And to see your long hair! (Don’t worry—we can shave it again if you want. Perhaps in our sixties?)”
Most of all, I want to hold her tight, this ghost of mine. I want to pull her to my chest as we laugh and sob and promise to never let go.
I won’t find this in the flesh, of course—no matter the depth of my longing or how much I look. But even knowing what I seek—even understanding my quest—allowed something to settle.
And while this particular settling is existential, it finds its way into the everyday—here, in my more easeful, less reckless version. A version who’s excited for life and high on life. A version who experiences infinitely more joy and connection.
In this month’s update from Thailand (a series I recently renamed My Soulful Life), I’ll explore two of the many ways this sense of serenity shows up:
A significant reduction in nighttime anxiety, and how this relates to money and being able to afford the cost of living in Thailand (which was rarely the case in the States or Canada)
Thai language school, and how the process of learning a language—particularly when living in a country where it’s spoken—is an exercise in mindfulness, an antidote to online myopia, and an expansive, beautiful blessing
Financial ease is reducing my lifelong anxiety.
The existential “settling” I describe above is part of a bigger exhale. Nowhere is this more apparent than each evening, when I shut my bedroom door, turn off the lights, and sit down to meditate.
I arrive at a meditative state gradually, first making space for the fear and anxiety that so often underpin everything else. Not as bad as when I was drinking, not as bad as early sobriety. But still, there they are: my nighttime companions since childhood.