But what happens when the haunting isn’t around us — it’s within us? When we’re the ones wearing the costume, scaring ourselves with stories that never happened? We do it all the time — crafting mental thriller films about what might go wrong, what people think, what we fear losing. We haunt our own peace with loops of worry, guilt, scary thoughts and imaginary danger.

We are all wounded and wondrous, victims and vessels, survivors and storytellers. When we speak our truth without shame, we harvest light from the dark. We release isolation and make space for connection, compassion, and renewal. That’s what this season is asking of us — to strip away what’s false, to compost what’s finished, and to honor the strange ingredients of our own becoming.

Every place where great loss and unimaginable atrocities have occurred, carries its own emotional resonance. Sensitive people—artists, healers, empaths—often pick up on that charge, while others might not ever realize it or put it together. The body becomes a conduit, channeling the unspeakable into sensation: tingling all over the body, heaviness in the chest, stomach, nausea, headache, fatigue, tears, and sometimes even illness that come from nowhere. I understand now what it means to be full on conduit with the soul. I literally became a container and the energy I experienced that day became a vehicle driving through my body, translating the unspeakable, unfathomable and disbelief into an angry expression my body became a vessel for.