Wrestling Ghosts

Classes at Drisha resumed this week after a couple of weeks off for Passover. At the end of a class I share with all the other artist fellows, one of my friends from the group came up to me.

“Julie, you’ve never looked better!” she said. “What happened?”

I started to laugh; I had no idea that all the shifts I had been experiencing lately—in particular in the last few weeks—were shining through.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting this year, and journaling, and figuring things out. And last week I wrote down everything I had learned—and since then, I’ve felt amazing every day.”

“You can tell,” she said. “I noticed as soon as you walked in the room.”

—

In movies, things explode and melt all around the hero for more than an hour and a half. He fights the bad guys, he defuses the bomb, he flips his car over a bridge, and always comes out on top (just maybe with a broken nose). Yet in many movies, there’s one more battle. You’ve seen it: our hero has conquered the world, has prevented the apocalypse, but in the end he needs to come to terms with some old ghosts—an ex, perhaps, or a drowned little girl. The awful things he said to his parents, not realizing he would never see them again. A schoolyard jealousy that never went away. Black, deep grief. You see, the last battle is always with himself, with his own brain—our hero can’t really be free until he wrestles with the ghosts in his head.

But when he does? And when day breaks, the morning after, and the ghosts have disappeared? Then he can emerge, triumphant, to his ticker-tape parade.

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