Mama, I'm Chasing a Ghost

I think one of the most naïve things I have ever done was assume that other people love the way I do.

It wasn’t a belief I consciously chose. In fact, I don’t think I realised I was carrying it until recently. It simply existed in the background of my life, quietly shaping the way I understood relationships, friendships, and human connection. Because I am naturally curious about people, I assumed curiosity was a common language and just because I wanted to understand others deeply, I assumed other people wanted the same thing.

Whenever I care about someone, I find myself becoming interested in the things that sit beneath the surface. I would happily swim through the entirety of a person if they let me. I want to know what experiences shaped them into who they are today and I want to understand the stories they tell themselves about their lives, the disappointments they still carry, the memories they return to when they are alone, and the dreams they have not spoken aloud in years. The more I care about someone, the more curious I become.

For a long time, I thought this was simply what intimacy looked like. Curiosity has always been the baseline of interest for me.

The older I get, however, the more I realise that people experience closeness in very different ways. Some people express love through loyalty. Others express it through generosity, reliability, protection, or presence. Not everyone feels compelled to understand another person’s inner world in the same way and not everyone is interested in peeling back layers and lingering over what they find there. Some, if not many, people are perfectly content with what can be known quickly and, truthfully, there is nothing inherently wrong with that.

I didn’t understand it at first. I moved through the world carrying an expectation I never stopped to examine. I assumed that because I was endlessly fascinated by other people, somebody would eventually be endlessly fascinated by me. Why wouldn’t they? I have an inner world so rich I wanted to share the wealth with everyone I know. I assumed that because I remembered details, somebody would remember mine. I assumed that because I approached people with curiosity, curiosity would eventually find its way back to me.

Looking back, I think this assumption has shaped more of my life than I realised. Whenever a friendship faded or a relationship disappointed me, I rarely felt upset about the loss itself. What lingered was often the feeling that something about me or the other person remained undiscovered. Such a shame, really. It felt as though people had left after reading the first few chapters of a book while I was still waiting for them to reach the middle. I kept believing that one day I would meet someone who wanted to know the whole story rather than the summary.

Oh, Mama, I think I finally understand the ghost I’ve been chasing.

It was never a soulmate, a future partner, or even a specific person waiting somewhere in the distance to begin with. The ghost was an assumption. It was the belief that somebody would eventually love me in the same way I loved them and that if I spent my life trying to understand people, somebody would one day try to understand me. It was my belief that if I remained curious about the hidden parts of others, somebody would remain curious about mine.

Maybe the reason it took me so long to recognise it is because the assumption always felt reasonable. After all, we make sense of the world through our own experiences. We assume that the things that matter deeply to us must matter deeply to other people too. We assume that the qualities we naturally offer will eventually return to us in the same form.

Looking at it now, I’m not even sure where that expectation came from. It simply existed. The more I think about it, the more embarrassed I feel admitting it out loud.

I genuinely believed somebody would meet me there.

We spend years believing that the things we naturally give away will eventually find their way back to us. The loyal person waits for loyalty. The gentle person waits for gentleness. The forgiving person waits for forgiveness. The curious person waits for curiosity. It feels reasonable because it is how we have learned to understand love, care, and connection.

Lately, I’ve been wondering how many of my disappointments were actually born from that belief. How many times was I grieving a person when I was really grieving an expectation? How many times did I walk away feeling unseen when what hurt most was discovering that somebody did not love in the language I had always assumed they would?

If my ghost was the assumption that somebody would one day become as fascinated by my inner world as I was by theirs, what assumption have you been carrying for so long that it no longer feels like an assumption at all?