Why 'Ghosting' is so toxic

Nov 04, 2024

You may have heard the term ‘Ghosting’ before, it seems to be popping up a lot recently with the rise of social media and internet dating. However, I don’t think it’s a new concept at all. I bet everyone has experienced it in some form or another over their lifetime? I certainly have. Especially since being diagnosed with a chronic illness.

So what is ghosting?

I’ve seen it being defined as ‘ending a personal relationship. Suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication’.

And wow, does it hurt.

I recently read an article on The Telegraph called ‘I’m 27 and dying of cancer, but my friends are ‘ghosting’ me in my final days’. The title speaks for itself. The article goes on to say this phenomenon is called ‘cancer ghosting’. The article follows a young man called Josh, who says that his friends stopped replying to his messages the further along he was on his cancer journey.

I had not heard of this exact term before, but it triggered something within me. I was deeply moved by this article and I can’t stop thinking about it. I cried when I first read it. It brought up a lot of emotions, for many different reasons which I will touch upon below.

Emotions it brought up for me:

Anger. How could his friends do this to him? How could another human being abandon their friend in their dying days? No matter how uncomfortable death is, there is no excuse for this behaviour. When someone you love is dying, you be there. You have a lifetime to process your feelings, but they don't.
Sadness. I find it so upsetting that he spent his last months/days wondering why his friends abandoned him. Instead of finding peace, connection and closure in his dying days, he had to be faced with unanswered questions, feelings of betrayal, and loneliness instead. This breaks my heart.
Disgust. The comments section regarding the article on Instagram was truly gross to me. The sheer lack of empathy from some people continues to shock me. There were such comments as ‘His friends probably tried but they were tired of the complaining’, ‘he doesn’t seem like a cheerful person’ and ‘he probably didn’t deal with it gracefully’.
Why do sick people continually have to invalidate their own emotions/feelings to make other people around them more comfortable? Even on your death bed, society is forcing you to wear a mask, shoving toxic positivity down your throat. It’s sending the dangerous message that you need to hide and repress huge parts of yourself. You literally have to say sorry and feel guilty about dying now too. If you don’t comply, society will reject you. I know I shouldn’t judge humanity by the comments section on social media, but my god does it make me worry about the future sometimes. It can feel like a very dangerous and scary place.
The truly annoying thing is, these people jumped to conclusions. They pushed the blame. ‘Probably' this, ‘probably’ that. They were projecting all their hate on him because they couldn’t accept their own uncomfortable feelings. If they had read the whole article, it showed what a loving, carefree and funny guy Josh was. But even then, why does he have to be happy and smiley (even in death), to be loved and accepted?
Hope. However, there was also an outpouring of love from people wanting to reach out and connect with him. People empathised and had similar experiences with their own cancer journeys and were connecting with one another by sharing their stories. There were other people that were as shocked and mortified as I was that this was happening to him. It gave me hope that humanity hasn’t lost all of its empathy just yet.
Confusion. It brought up a lot of unresolved feelings about one of my own experiences of ghosting. Someone I classed as one of my best friends ghosted me a few years back. I am still left wondering what I did that was so wrong, that they felt they didn’t even want to give me an explanation. Did I mean that little to them? It made me question our whole friendship and it’s tainted every experience we ever shared together. Over ten years of memories felt ruined. Was she faking it the whole time? I’m now super paranoid that I’m pushing other people away without realising it. My self-esteem has certainly been knocked because of it. It’s made me constantly question and doubt myself when I try to make new friends or connect with the ones I still have. I hate that it still bothers me so much.
Grief. It reminded me of the loneliness and grief I felt when my mum died over 20 years ago due to cancer. Thankfully, many people were there for her in her dying days. However, I feel most people don’t know how to be around someone who is grieving and mourning the loss of someone they love. I often felt like people were avoiding me after my mum died. When I went back to school the kids would sometimes stare and point at me. They didn’t know what to say. They would get uncomfortable if I expressed sadness or tears.
I understand why kids couldn’t deal with that, no other kid had lost their parent in my year, but it was also the adults around me that didn't know what to do. I was often left alone (emotionally) to deal with these huge uncomfortable feelings by myself at the age of 12 years old. I learnt that expressing certain emotions was acceptable- like happiness, and others- like sadness and anger, were not because it made others uncomfortable. So I held them inside. I truly believe this caused me not only a lot of unnecessary emotional and mental distress, but also a lot of physical problems too. If you don't let your emotions out, the body will find ways of doing it for you.
This also happens to a lot of people who have a chronic illness. People don’t know what to say to someone who has an incurable condition. They often ask ‘Are you feeling better yet?’. ‘Well no, that’s the point, I will never feel better’ you reply honestly. They shift around uncomfortably, make awkward small talk and run away. So you learn to nod your head and say something like ‘Just plodding on’. ‘Yes, I’m fine thanks’. You learn that expressing your true feelings often leads to rejection, so you hold it all inside, letting the loneliness and disconnect fester within you instead. Sometimes that feels easier to deal with than flat out rejection.
Fear. When you have a chronic illness like I do, it makes you feel incredibly vulnerable. You rely more on those closest to you. Both in a practical way, like chores around the house when I’m too fatigued to do them myself, but also in an emotional way. I need people to talk to and to feel loved. I need reassurance that I'm still loveable even when I can't contribute as much. You rely on people to come to you, because you don't always have the strength to leave your own bed/house.
Reading this article unlocked a fear in me that I hadn’t voiced before- the deep fear of being abandoned. Humans are social creatures. We have evolved to live in communities. We’re not supposed to live life alone. Our bodies are wired to be around people- our hormones and nervous systems are built for connection. When we don’t have this, our bodies interpret this as being in imminent danger. Anxiety takes over. It makes us sick. Because back in the day, being outcast by your group would have meant almost certain death. You can’t survive on your own out there in the cold. Whilst Josh, the man in the article, had his mum and nurses to look after him in his dying days, it made me question, who would show up for me?
I know deep down that I have people close to me who love me, but I’m sure Josh felt his friends would have shown up for him too, but they didn’t. I feel silly for even saying it, but the doubts start to creep in on those days when you feel more sick and vulnerable. The ‘but what if’s’ start to win.
Guilt. I thought to myself, how many times have I intentionally (or unintentionally) avoided someone going through a hard time, because I had no idea how to console them, or because I didn’t know what to say to them. How many times have I felt uncomfortable because I couldn’t take their pain away, so instead of reaching out, I retreated? Which made them feel even worse!
We’ve all been guilty of this. Yes, there are times we need to protect our own mental health and boundaries, but I’m sure there are many instances where we could have been braver and had those difficult conversations instead.

So why did I continue to read the article?

Wow, that is a lot of emotions from just one article. You might be thinking Why did you continue to read it if it upset you so much?

It would have been really easy for me to just stop reading it and put it away, go about my day as if nothing ever happened, but that was exactly the reason why I continued to read it...

Because it’s too easy these days to turn our backs on uncomfortable emotions and hard conversations. To ignore people. To ‘swipe right or left’ with no explanation. To close our phones and pretend people don't exist. To ignore our own emotions and bury them away, unresolved. It desensitizes us to people's pain.

But nothing ever gets resolved that way.

People are left with confusion and unresolved grief. They will jump to the worst case scenario in their minds and always presume they are the problem. It will eat away at them.

I’ve learnt that if I don’t talk about stuff, it gets trapped in my body. I don’t want to do that to myself any longer.

Maybe if we all started talking about these things (loneliness, death, grief, illness), they wouldn't feel so scary. We wouldn't have to face them alone. Things could move forward, instead of stagnating. Emotions wouldn’t turn to poison in our own bodies.

How I wish it went…

What would've happened if Joshes friends were just radically honest with him instead? Maybe they would've said something like:

‘I’m so sorry you’re going through this Josh. I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t want to say the wrong thing. I’m scared and I’m feeling a bit uncomfortable, as I don’t know how best to help you. I’ve never been around someone who is dying/ ill before and I don’t know how to deal with this’.

And what if Josh was open and honest with them back, and replied with something like:

‘It’s ok. I’m scared too. This is shit. I don’t know how to deal with this either. But you don’t need to do or say anything. Just show up and sit with me. That would be enough’.

How different would his last days be if those honest (and yes hard) conversations took place? He would have felt seen, comforted, supported. His friends could let go of all that tension and guilt. All the responsibility wouldn't have fallen on his mother's shoulders. She would have someone to support her in her grief too. They all would have deepened their relationships and felt a connection like no other. Heart to heart, soul to soul.

So what can we do?

Sometimes words are important, but sometimes just sitting with someone in silence is enough. It’s the showing up that counts. It’s having the right intentions behind your actions. You don’t need to offer solutions. You don’t need to find a cure. You don’t need to find the right words. You can just sit there. Hold a hand. Hug them. Meditate or pray with them. Sit in a contemplative silence. Watch a movie or listen to music together.

Just having someone next to you in tough times is incredibly powerful. You can feel their energy, their warmth, hear their breath- it’s comforting to know another human being is next to you. Their presence shows how much they care. Your nervous system can relax. You feel safe. Suddenly all those scary emotions don't feel as overwhelming anymore.

And isn't that what every human being on this planet ultimately wants to feel….safe?

So people may laugh and throw around the term ‘ghosting’ like it's one big joke, but I think there's a really toxic and frankly quite dangerous element to it all. It's teaching people to ignore certain emotions, teaching them to repress them. Distracting themselves to oblivion. We can’t process emotions if we keep numbing them out.

The culture of ghosting is teaching people to not have the hard conversations that are so desperately needed for closure. It teaches people to not check in with themselves and others. It's teaching society that they can throw people to the side like they’re garbage. Including some of the most vulnerable, like the ill and the disabled, which we saw in the story outlined above.

It makes people feel like outcasts and the only way the body can respond to this is with deep stress to their nervous systems. And we all know the damage that stress does to both our bodies and to society at large.

Overall, I feel it can lead to people losing touch with their humanity, empathy and feelings of safety.

I feel incredibly thankful that I have amazing friends and family around me at this time to help comfort me and to make me feel loved and safe, but I know a lot of people don't have that right now. It really saddens me because it feels like that should be a basic human right, to feel loved and to feel safe. To feel seen.

And the sad thing is, it often wouldn’t take much for that person to feel comforted, it just takes someone in their life to simply show up, that would be enough…

How about you?

Have you ever been ghosted? How did it make you feel? Did you wish that person would have just been honest with you instead, or did you appreciate the lack of confrontation? Was ghosting actually the best way forward for you instead? How did you find closure after being ghosted? I would be really interested to know in the comments below.

In my bones...

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