When I wrote Ghost, it came from a place of feeling invisible in relationships, like I’d slowly disappear just to keep the peace. Times when I was scared to say what I really felt because honesty might push someone away. It’s that quiet prison where your sensitivity feels like something to hide. I’ve often found myself trapped in my own thoughts, replaying conversations, trying to work out where I went wrong, when really the truth is simpler: I was never seen for who I really am. I was hiding it to feel accepted.
Looking back, I realise that I started off already carrying a lot of emotional damage. Not because of my family or anything dramatic, but because of the world I grew up in. Society made me believe I was wrong. Being gay in the shadow of the AIDS crisis was hard. That fear and stigma hung over everything. It told me that who I was wasn’t safe, that to be myself was to risk rejection or disgust. I grew up absorbing the message that different meant bad.
When I was a teenager, I was extremely emotional. I felt things deeply and was often told that was wrong or too much. I used to think love meant big gestures and endless devotion, the kind of love you hear in songs like Celine Dion’s Because You Loved Me or You Are the Reason. Those songs shaped how I saw love, something pure, consuming, and unconditional. I believed that if I loved someone with that intensity, they’d see me and value me. So when I felt love for the first time, I grabbed onto it with both hands and was terrified to let go. It wasn’t really the person I was clinging to, it was the fantasy of what love could give me, acceptance and belonging.
Over time I learned that real love isn’t about losing yourself in someone else’s story. It’s not about shrinking so someone else can feel comfortable.
Lines like “the light flickers in my head” came from that space of rediscovery. It’s about those moments when I almost remember my worth. It’s there, but it fades. The light represents the truth of what I deserve, kindness, care, honesty, but sometimes it only shines for a second before the doubt returns. The song became a way of processing that grief, the loss of what I hoped love would be, and the realisation that parts of me had been dimmed to survive.
The ghost also represents those false ideas of love that I used to hold onto. The fantasy that love could save me, that being good or patient or endlessly forgiving would somehow make someone stay. I grieved those illusions the same way I grieved people. Every time a relationship ended, it wasn’t just losing them, it was losing another layer of belief in that fairy-tale.
Ghost is about reclaiming the parts of me that went quiet. The sensitive, emotional, hopeful parts I once thought were wrong. It’s about recognising that being unseen doesn’t mean being unworthy, and that sometimes the most haunting presence is that version of me trying to be loved and accepted by others, but now I know that comes from within me. In that way, the ghost isn’t just a loss, it’s also a reminder of everything still waiting to come back to life.