There is a secret to moving past a bad breakup. It isn’t crying in a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. It isn’t putting on your highest heels and going out dancing with your girlfriends. It isn’t burning old pictures and love letters in a Taylor Swift-esque fit of rage and revenge. The secret of moving past bad breakups and the ending of a relationship is about letting go of ghosts.

Ghost are not the scary apparitions of Halloween parties and scary movies. Ghosts, in this sense, are the memories, feelings, and lingering emotions people leave behind when they walk out of your life and never look back. Ghosting, a term that has been coined by the millennial dating scene, refers to this phenomenon of getting to know another person, personally, emotionally, and even physically and then just cutting off all ties and communication. Radio silence. The problem with this type of ending to a relationship always centers on the idea of closure. Most people feel that after they have invested time and emotions into another person, they are entitled to atleast an explanation or understanding of why things end. But as most of us know, most relationships don’t start or end with a polite shaking of hands and completely understandable terms. Relationships are messy. Relationships are emotional and risky and require work on the ends of both parties involved. To assume that after all of the raw and realness we put into giving all of our insecurities, deepest feelings, fears, and dreams to another that we can neatly tie the end of a relationship up with a bow and move on is unrealistic.

In every person our lives touch, I think we leave a little of ourselves with them. With these little pieces of who we are, it’s impossible to control how much we give to people unless we leave ourselves completely closed off and our hearts walled with every interaction. Most of us love recklessly, carelessly sharing the pieces that make up who we are with another person hoping that they will chose to do the same. When a relationship ends, we are left carrying these pieces around with us, the ghosts of the relationship we once had, until we decide to let them go.

I’ve been haunted by these ghosts. I’ve carried around memories, good and bad, refused to get rid of old pictures, saved text message conversations and reread them, trying to rework where the tone changed from one of overwhelming love and affection to cold communications. I’ve lay in bed at night, wide awake in the company of the ghosts that wouldn’t leave me alone. I turned good memories into memorials of golden times. I turned the bad ones into cautionary tales of how things can go so horribly wrong. I’ve spit venom about ex’s and gone over and over my favorite stories to tell. It took a while for me to realize that caring the weight of resentment, mistakes, and pain was just tying to a person I no longer was and a time in my life that had long passed.

If there is one thing I’ve learned about moving on, it’s that letting go of the ghosts of relationships or almost relationships past is the only way to unshackle yourself from the shame, guilt, and left over heartache that you may still be experiencing. Going into a new relationship still licking the wounds from your last one will only result in making the same mistakes and carrying over the same issues that you already had. By letting wounds heal and ghost moves on we guarantee ourselves the ability to start the next phase of our lives. A quote I truly resonate with is, “You can’t start the next chapter of your life if you keep rereading the last one.” Trust yourself enough to start a blank page and a new chapter in your story and watch the magic on new beginnings unfold.