By Lauren Stewart
Let me explain.
A few weeks ago I put on a ghost costume, got into a pool, and took pictures. Not because it made any logical sense. Not because it was planned or polished or part of some carefully curated content strategy.
Because it made me laugh. Because it felt silly and free and completely, unapologetically mine. Because somewhere between the bedroom floor and where I am now, I found something I had lost for a very long time.
The audacity to be a little weird.
What nobody tells you about healing
When most people imagine healing, they picture something quiet and serious. Journaling by candlelight. Long walks in nature. Therapy sessions and breakthroughs and the slow, dignified process of becoming whole.
And yes — healing involves all of that. The real kind, anyway. The kind that asks you to look honestly at your life and face what you find there and do the hard, unglamorous work of changing course.
But here is what nobody tells you.
Healing also looks like laughing at yourself. Like doing something completely ridiculous just because it brings you joy. Like wearing a ghost costume in a pool on a random afternoon because you can, because you want to, because the version of you who spent years managing everyone else's emotions and shrinking into corners and taking up as little space as possible would never have done something this delightfully pointless — and that is exactly why you are doing it now.
Healing is serious work. And it is also, eventually, the recovery of your sense of humor. Your lightness. Your willingness to be seen doing something that has no purpose except that it makes you happy.
The audacity piece
I talk a lot about audacity because I think it is one of the most underrated ingredients in any real transformation.
Not the loud, performative kind. The quiet, private kind. The audacity to want more than you were given. To believe the life you keep imagining is actually available to you. To take up space — in a room, in a conversation, in your own life — without apologizing for it.
And sometimes, honestly, the audacity to put on a ghost costume and get in a pool and post the pictures anyway.
Because here is what I have learned: the people who change their lives are not always the most disciplined or the most motivated or the most certain that things are going to work out. They are often simply the ones who decided at some point to stop taking themselves so seriously that they forgot to enjoy the life they were building.
Healing does not mean becoming more serious. It means becoming more free. Free enough to be exactly who you are — including the parts that are a little strange, a little silly, a little much — without needing anyone's permission or approval to do it.
What the ghost costume actually represents
I spent a long time being invisible.
Not literally — but in the way that people who grow up managing everyone else's needs become invisible. Always in the background. Always the one holding things together. Always present in service of someone else's moment rather than fully inhabiting your own.
A ghost, if you think about it, is the perfect metaphor for that kind of existence. Present but not seen. There but not fully arrived. Haunting the edges of a life rather than living in the center of it.
So when I put on that costume and jumped in the pool — laughing, ridiculous, completely unbothered by how it looked — it was not just a silly photo opportunity. It was a declaration.
I am not a ghost anymore.
I am here. Fully, audaciously, sometimes absurdly here. In the pool. In the pictures. In the life I spent years too afraid to claim as mine.
And it feels really, really good.
Permission to be a little weird
If you are somewhere in the middle of your own healing right now — if you are doing the hard work of auditing your life and clearing what does not belong and building something new — I want to give you something today that nobody gave me for a very long time.
Permission to be a little weird.
Permission to laugh at yourself. To do the thing that makes no sense but brings you joy. To show up online or in your living room or in a pool in a ghost costume and be exactly, fully, unapologetically yourself — not despite the healing, but because of it.
Because that is what the other side of all this work looks like. Not perfect. Not polished. Not a highlight reel of someone who has figured everything out.
Just someone who is finally, genuinely, enjoying the life she fought so hard to build.
Ghost costume optional. Audacity required.
This fall, try this:
Do one thing this season that is completely, joyfully pointless. Something that makes you laugh. Something that has no purpose except that it makes you happy. Something the version of you from two years ago would have talked yourself out of because you were too busy managing everyone else or too worried about how it looked.
Then notice how it feels.
Because that feeling — that lightness, that freedom, that quiet sense of being exactly where you are supposed to be — is not separate from the healing.
It is the healing.
Happy almost-Halloween from a ghost in a pool who is very much alive and entirely too happy about it. 👻
