Ghost started in 2014. That year I came out of the relationship I wrote about in Love Arsonist, the one that set everything alight. When it ended, I didn’t feel free. I felt hollow. I was a shell of the person I’d been. My confidence had gone, my sense of who I was had gone, and for a long time I moved through life like a ghost. I was going through the motions, there but not really there. That’s why Ghost sits straight after Love Arsonist on the EP. Love Arsonist is the fire. Ghost is what was left in the ashes.
Lines like “the light flickers in my head” came from the slow process of finding my way back. It’s about the moments when I almost remember my worth. It’s there, but it fades. The light stands for what I deserve: kindness, care and honesty. Sometimes it only shines for a second before the doubt returns.
But the longer I’ve lived with the song, the more I’ve realised it isn’t only about that one relationship. Feeling invisible was something I’d done for years. I’d slowly disappear just to keep the peace. There were times 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 and trying to work out where I went wrong. 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 I went into that relationship already carrying a lot of emotional damage. It wasn’t 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, and that being myself meant risking rejection or disgust. I grew up absorbing the message that different meant bad.
As 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: 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, which was acceptance and belonging.
So the ghost is also those false ideas of love I used to hold onto. I believed love could save me, and that being good, patient or endlessly forgiving would somehow make someone stay. I grieved those illusions the same way I grieved people. Every time a relationship ended, I wasn’t just losing them. I was losing another layer of belief in that fairy tale. The song became a way of processing that grief, both the loss of what I hoped love would be and the realisation that parts of me had been dimmed just to survive.
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.
Ghost is about reclaiming the person I was before 2014 hollowed me out, and the sensitive, emotional, hopeful parts of me I once thought were wrong. It’s about recognising that being unseen doesn’t mean being unworthy. Sometimes the most haunting presence is the version of me who was trying to be loved and accepted by others. Now I know that acceptance 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.
GHOST2·0 is out now, and features on my debut EP LOVE UNSPOKEN, out 16 October.
Pre-save GHOST2·0 here:
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