It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.” – Susan Sontag
In 2013, a month or so after my first book came out, I wrote to a family member with whom I had been extraordinarily close; she was on vacation on the other side of the world, but always remained in contact via text or email. A day went by; I got no response. I wrote again; I got no response. A week passed; nothing. I wrote again; no response. I thought that maybe she had been in an accident, or was ill, but there she was, all over her Facebook page, smiling broadly in the Southeast Asian sun. I wrote again; nothing. I checked my social media feeds; she was still following me, everywhere. But: nothing.
A chill crept up my spine and grabbed me by the neck.
As a young teenager, I was part of a big circle of middle school friends who moved together in a pack. We were in all the same classes, we spent our afternoons together, and when Friday night rolled around, we met at someone’s house and essentially didn’t go back to our respective homes until Sunday. I went away to camp that summer and when I came back to school in September, the phone didn’t ring. I saw everyone in class, and when the bell rang, they stood up and walked out without me. Invitations, weekends, parties, after school pizza: it was over. I didn’t know why, and when I asked one of them — the nicest one — she looked at her shoes and said I’m sorry, and walked away. Then came the crank phonecalls and the hang-ups, the nasty letters sent to my grandmother who lived across the street from me. When I saw them at school, I asked What did I do wrong? No answer. A year later, I returned to school from sleepaway camp; my stomach was in knots as I stepped into my homeroom. Everyone greeted me as though nothing had happened. I welcomed them welcoming me back into their lives—wanting me—as though I’d been on a long journey alone, schlepping through the desert of ambiguous banishment. It had been a test; I didn’t die.
The question, though, is why?
Why had they done it? Why had my family member made the decision to slice me out of her life a little more than a decade after we’d traveled to the Balkans together, hiked together, cooked together, rather than talk to me about whatever it was that was bothering her? And why did I assume — I always assumed — that it was I who had done something specific that resulted in my being ghosted?
Over the years, I have been on the receiving end of ghosting more times than I care to say or admit; it’s like there’s some sort of karmic fulfillment at play. There is no small amount of shame attached to the act of ghosting, which instantly puts the ghostee in the position of sorrowful, silent wondering and a kind of begging: What have I done wrong? What can I do to make it right? When it used to happen, I would turn myself inside out trying to unravel it, but then I wanted to know: what is the part of my personality that draws ghosters like metal to magnet? Even if I know that they have this propensity and I have been warned by others, it seems to happen again and again.
My response to it, though, is different. I want to understand who they are, why they do what they do, and how directly connected to questions of domination the act of ghosting really is.
Ghosting is a highly divisive, aggressive, even political act that sets up domination of one person over another, pits one person against another, or one group against one person for reasons that are often unclear, non-sensical, whimsical (meaning, for sport).
In 2016, three years after losing my family member to an extreme form of ghosting that involved not only her, but many other family members she tried to cajole into joining her — most of them didn’t bite; I can’t help but think that they saw what she was capable of and didn’t want to risk her ire — I began to read, and to write about it. My research was not focused, though, on current psychological studies by researchers like Kipling Williams or Brene Brown and others, but on the existence of ghosting — of ostracism, banishment, and isolation — in the most historical of terms.
The word ostracize comes from the Latinized ancient Greek for ostrakizein, meaning to publicly and legally vote to banish someone for a decade, using potshards upon which a person’s name would be scratched if they were deemed dangerous to the liberties of the people or embarrassing to the state.
The liberties of the people or embarrassing to the state. Meaning: they somehow inhibited the freedom — physical, psychological, emotional — of another. Or they caused discomfort, humiliation, or shame to The State. The State can mean anything: a family, a group of friends, a cohort.
Going back further to the times of the Matriarchs and Patriarchs, we have the story of The Azazel — The Scapegoat — who carries the burden of the Sins of the People and is sent away and into the desert to wander alone forever.
Being ghosted is the modern expression of ancient ostracism, banishment, and isolation. Ostracism, banishment, and isolation directly impact the human need for closure, belonging, support, and ritual. For sustenance.
Ghosting has its roots not in bullying, but in killing: making people go away, or sending them to the proverbial cornfield which, thanks to smart phones and social media, is as simple as tapping BLOCK.
So: Why is ghosting suddenly showing up everywhere as a topic for discussion apart from the fact that it sucks? Because all of us will go through it at some point, often more than once. Many of us will also be perpetrators of it, and some of us will only ever be on the receiving end. Ghosting is a highly divisive, aggressive, even political act that sets up domination of one person over another, pits one person against another, or one group against one person for reasons that are often unclear, non-sensical, whimsical (meaning, for sport). It has its roots not in bullying, but in killing: making people go away, or sending them to the proverbial cornfield which, thanks to smart phones and social media, is as simple as tapping BLOCK. As I wrote in a Dame Magazine essay back in 2021,
“Text-messaging has made adult ghosting far less messy, but crueler. You know when someone has read your message or when they haven’t. If they respond without a READ notification appearing after your note, it means they’ve manually disabled that notification so the person on the other end can’t tell whether they’ve seen it. Ghosting via text is like the little black purse of social snubbing: Everyone wears it, and it goes with every occasion.”
When I began writing about food and the table, it was not because I was so fanatically interested in learning how to sous vide a steak, or make a perfect Sauce Espagnole, or duplicate my grandmother’s Friday night roast chicken. I went to cooking school; I already knew how to do those things. What I wanted was to quell the visceral knowledge that I had, at times, been left in the wilderness, and that my connection to others could be as tenuous and wobbly as a rope bridge; I did this by setting my table, by putting people around it, by trying to create an environment of sustenance and nurturing rather than quiet enmity that could implode at any minute.
It will never guarantee anything, any kind of safety from ghosting for any of us — myself, my family, or anyone I feed. But it is why we come together around this Modern Tribal Fire, whether we want to admit it or not.
This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack.
Images courtesy of author.