Ghost Stories

The ghosts of your past shaped your reality, moulded your future, and haunt you only to remind you how much you deserve. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be me. So, acknowledge your ghosts. Because without them, who would you be?

–Sonya Matejko

If It Weren’t For You: Acknowledging Your Ghosts

Last year, this was what I had to say about the topic of ghosts:

Phasmophobia

Then, last October, as Halloween drew near, my family and I went for a weekend in Niagara Falls. On the last night some of us went on a haunted walk at Fort George, in Niagara on the Lake.

NiagaraGhosts.com

It was my first time doing one of these. I’d been spending the month writing about phobia and how to face it. I wanted to see if I could handle a ghost walk.

Well, I wrote about the experience, but then I lost my laptop. I can’t be certain, but I think I’ve lost what I wrote. Theory could suggest that it was the ghosts, that they didn’t want me to write about them, and so they got rid of the evidence.

Reported sightings.

Well, I don’t really believe that actually. I ended up being incredibly touched by the history we learned about the site, a soldier’s fort during the War of 1812, between Canada and the US.

There were so many stories, sad and mysterious, about those soldiers and their families. The tour guide was animated and knowledgeable. He spoke of history, lives lived, and I couldn’t say if I totally discounted ghosts or not as we drove away at the end of the tour.

I was with cynics and yet, I didn’t like to say anything for certain. I try to keep an open mind, but I do believe most things can be logically explained. People believe, but I can’t really blame them for wanting to feel close to those they love.

This was billed as a special Halloween themed tour, different and more than the regular tours, but it was a beautiful autumn evening and I am glad I went.

Months later, in the middle of winter, I tried another ghost walk, through the streets of Ottawa and through the old Ottawa Jail. There are so many stories of haunted places and people, especially at this time of year, love to be scared.

I believe ghosts aren’t actually real in the way most might think, but that ghosts are the memories of people, those no longer in our lives and that they can be felt, if one pays close enough attention, as the imprints of what once was.

There are those who are not here now, in my life, but I feel them and they haunt me where I live.

It might be the memories of old friends or those of a lost love:

Ghosts Are Real

Then there are sites of history, old abandoned sites, like these:

Abandoned America

I watch a lot of documentaries, whether about those pour souls murdered in the Holocaust or those patients who once lived and died in the mental institutions, you can feel the spaces they inhabited, and I believe it is important to acknowledge the spaces they took up in life.

It could be a cemetery, like where I visited the graves of my grandparents. I toured, not only old and abandoned forts, but also jails, and sites of torn down mental hospitals and I felt the people who once lived in those places. They lived and died there. Their souls are hopefully at peace, as the living pass by, but it feels slightly disrespectful to traipse over these spots:

Ghosts are Scary, Disabled People are Not: The Troubling Rise of the Haunted Asylum

These were human beings once. I believe they are gone, but I can understand recognizing the energy of their existence, which I have felt, myself, when I’ve visited where they once dwelt.

Now, with the popularity of touring asylums, forts, relics from years ago – this could be seen in a negative light. These people had families and people who loved them, but they make for good stories to tell for a thrill.

The ghosts of the past, the memories of my loved ones who, for whatever reason, are just not here anymore.

If you need a way to explain the lack of people in your life, as to the question of where they go, because I’ve always had issues with facing the fact that certain people may be in my life one day and gone the next.

All the fun and games of the holiday of Halloween are great and all. I’m more into all that than I’ve ever been before.

I just am more interested in the stories of the real human lives, the love, the loss.

Ghost – Ella Henderson

Spotlight Sunday: Single Strides

Welcome to February: first day of a new month, shortest of them all, and just days away from celebrating one year of having this amazing platform for expression and sharing that I’ve discovered.

More on that to come.

Before that, today I am pleased to highlight my first Spotlight of February: Sonya Matejko, more commonly/well-known as:

Single Strides.

Below I question her on all the wisdom I have found at her blog, on writing, and more importantly on life.

There is a second part, a set of travel questions I hope to post on my travel website very soon.

But now I am thrilled to bits that she has agreed to speak to me here. So here she is.

***

She says, first and foremost on her blog, that Single Strides is:

“A blog about falling in love, falling apart, and traveling the world in between.”

This, I read on discovering her, and I was totally hooked. These are the things I write and think about every day.

In this first of her blog posts I wanted to highlight amongst my questions, she speaks on how to deal with the “what if’s and the what not’s”.

You Are So Much More Than Your Mistakes

She says:

“If you were to look up and see the sun you’d realize there are things bigger than your past mistakes.”

Some excellent perspective she offers here.

K: Explain, what is your website all about, what does the name mean to you, and how did you come up with it? What made you start it when you did?

S: Single Strides is a blog about falling in love, falling apart, and traveling the world in between. I started it, truthfully, after a breakup.  Now it survives as a place to share my journey of falling back in love with life and the world around me. Because sometimes, in order for someone to be a muse… they have to be the heartbreak too. 

“There are far too many expectations – don’t meet them. There are far too many rules – go break them. There are far too many risks – take them all.”

6 Things Every 20 Something Should Be Grateful For

The second of her posts I’ve chosen to highlight is one for all the twenty something’s. It is a very popular blog niche out there, as it is a decade for learning and growing in this generation’s youth. I especially loved points 5 and 6 for her unique perspective on the morning commute and on the promise of a new day, every day.

K: Have you always loved writing and why? 

S: Yes. Ever since I can remember I was a writer. Even in Kindergarten we were to all publish a book, and mine made it to the city’s newspaper. From there my love for writing only grew. It’s an escape to a different world. As a writer, you live in your imagination and it brings a different kind of light into your life. And now, I’d have to say my biggest joy from writing comes from messages from people who have been positively effected by my writing. It’s an indescribable blessing to inspire.

“She dreams of better days and of feats achieved. Her imagination runs as wild as the breeze and it joins with the rain while it floods the fields – only so life could grow. She dreams of a bloom but fear is keeping her from planting the seed. So she lives in her past and smiles out of practice. She’s happy with the present as slowly as she lets it come. but she’s stuck on the memories that no longer ring true. And the people that are gone but she still clings to.”

This third of her posts I’ve selected is my favourite, for sure. I had trouble picking just one quote from this one. Do yourself a favour and check out what she had to say. She so perfectly describes the state of me at many times in my life. It’s kind of scary actually, as if she has seen into my mind.

🙂

Sitting With The PAst

She has inspired me with all she says here about how to live with and accept the past, while learning to let go and move forward.

K: Where and how have you learned the most about how to become a writer or how to improve and grow as a writer? 

S: Honestly, I still work on it every day. My grammar is still not where it needs to be, and I could definitely increase my vocabulary. Yet I do think my most valuable lessons on writing have all come from the simple mantra of “write what you know.”

“To my ex thank you for breaking my heart. If it weren’t for the heartbreak, this blog would never exist. This is the home of all the emotions that you spilled out of me that had nowhere to go.”

Thank You For 2014

In this post she thanks people, from her friends and family to her readers and to the one who broke her heart. This is giving credit where credit is due because love, even when it ends, shapes us and it brought her to the point where she had to write this blog. Very glad of that.

K: What do you believe writing can bring to our world or achieve for a better world. if anything? What, for you, is the connection between love and writing? 

S: Writing can change you once you’ve read it – even if for a moment. There have been countless books that have inspired me to live my life a different way. Countless articles that can given me the courage to act, the will to laugh, and the hope that things will get better. Writing has an intense power to sway your heart and your mind. Us writers need to keep sharing our words not for the sake of sharing, but to change just one life.

“Single strides will get me there. They may not always be straight, they may sometimes be clumsy, but they will always be moving forward. So how many decisions did it take me to get to where I am now? I could ask the tide, or I could just let it cool my feet ant just be happy I am simply alive to feel it.”

Ramblings and Reflections

This has been her path and I can’t wait to continue to follow her through her posts.

K: What are your future hopes, plans, and dreams for your writing and for Single Strides? 

S: I really would love to grow my brand. I’d love for people to really resonate with it and look forward to upcoming articles. I’d eventually like to have a big enough fan base to begin (or edit) my novel. My end goal has always been to publish a book, and not just to get on the B&N shelves… but to be the book people tell their friends “you absolutely have to read this.”

“Because you’ll never get to where you’re meant to go by standing still.”

Six Months of Single Strides

And here’s to many many more.

***

I want to thank Sonya for agreeing to answer these questions I had for her and for being her true, authentic self. She, in her early twenties, has discovered things I am just now learning as I enter my thirties. She does it all, by sharing her journey with heartbreak (which is what I first majorly related to in her writing) and by being independent and strong in every single stride forward she is taking in her life.

Sonya has been published in such publications as:

Elite Daily,

and

Thought Catalog

And has written guest posts for:

The Fickle Heartbeat

As Told Over Brunch

and

Young and Twenty

Also, you can keep up with her on the following social media outlets:

Twitter

and on

Facebook

Sonya is making single stride after single stride and little does she know it, but she has helped me work through hard times and difficult transitions. Her story, my own, and many others is:

“PROOF HOPELESS ROMANTICS AREN’T SO HOPELESS AFTER ALL”

10 Reasons Why Hopeless Romantics Aren’t Hopeless After All

Good to know.

🙂

Thank you, Sonya, for all this and much more.>