Something sinister happened this week. I was sitting in my office making edits to my book when a flood of ghostly memories made themselves known again.

My body went flush with horror as I had a physical reaction to That Girl, my girl, me only ten years ago. She sat next to me fully visible, every embarrassment, bad decision, shameful action in tact. There she was in all her naive glory.

I’ve done all but deny her existence for the later part of my twenties in favor for looking good, being the kind of person I thought I should have always been and was for all anyone else knew. I did a good job suppressing her memory and even changing her identity to a less humiliating early version me. It seemed to work, except once in a while I’d be performing mundane tasks, like opening a can of tuna, when an especially revelatory incident would come to me suddenly and vividly. Like the crazy lady I am, my body would actually recoil and I’d basically tell myself that memory, the one that just did a drive-by, probably didn’t happen that way. But it did. It was exactly that way.

That Girl is my soul toupee, what Author Tim Kreider calls our lurking flaws we try to hide but are visible to the world with all the garish ostentatiousness of a toupee. I resisted her, neglected her, downright questioned her existence for half a decade of my twenties. And yet there she remained, remarkably in tact, and even more shocking, happy to see me.

My denying her existence never made her go away, of course, but it gave That Girl power over me. At any point in time something as ephemeral as a memory or a few words made in passing from old friends would conjure her up and there she’d be torturing me. I never realized I went through life and That Girl, my soul toupee, was right behind me figuratively lurking like a ghost behind my back. My denial her most abundant source of power.

She did not do this to hurt me. That Girl wanted to be acknowledged, embraced and loved. She patiently waited the better part of a decade so I could do the one thing that would make her stop scaring the shit out of me whenever I thought about her: deal with her.

There are words I believe have been carelessly tossed around so much they’ve lost their luster. Vulnerability is one. What this word means is to sit with the things that make us feel deep shame, real embarrassment. The type of thoughts that make us change the subject and tempt us to rewrite our stories. Our ghosts are not intentionally haunting us, in fact, we are the ones who invoke their phantom presence every time we resist a part of ourselves. That Girl comes in different forms for all of us. I’ve seen her show up as a jealousy, badmouthing, cheating, anger, violence. That Girl is a shapeshifter and she is in our lives as the thing we want so badly to wish away, wish we never did or thought that horrible thing that doesn’t even feel like us so why acknowledge it is us at all?

“Embrace That Girl,” my dear friend told me as I was finally recounting my horrors. “She is your meal ticket.”

I stared at her open mouthed in fascination. The two of us did, me and That Girl whose presence was so real I could see her sitting next to me.

My friend is right. Our nasty little histories and the things we avoid are quite literally the things we must go to. When we run to these shameful heat maps of memories and uneasiness, we can absorb all that energy and use it as the very thing that will give us what we desire most.

I ran towards That Girl in the shape of my book. I went back and rewrote her as she was, warts and all. You see, I had given That Girl some touch ups, a little decision changed here, a few insecurities removed there, overall minor deletions. But when I reversed the spiritual tummy tuck I gave That Girl, something peculiar happened. I couldn’t feel her lingering around me. What I did feel is a sense of release and pride and rawness that comes from being seen–– for real. I understood in a literal sense that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, as Einstein told us… but it can be alchemized. I know That Girl gifted me all the energy she was occupying as resisted black matter, and I converted it into fuel for my work and radical compassion.

That Girl did not besmirch my reputation, she is the foundation of everything good in my life.