Finding strength in the spectral echoes of your past creative failures and memories.
Why are you so haunted by the ghosts of the person you used to be?
You walk past the ghost signs on the sides of the brick warehouses in the Exchange District every morning, those fading advertisements for flour and tractor parts that haven’t existed for eighty years. They aren’t scars; they are just layers of a story that refuses to be completely painted over. Your own internal life is much the same, a collection of previous versions that didn’t quite make the cut but refuse to vacate the premises. You carry the faint outlines of every project you abandoned and every awkward conversation you had at a house party in Wolseley. Instead of trying to scrub the wall clean, maybe you should just lean into the transparency of it all.
In our local arts scene, there is a frantic pressure to be “new,” to be the latest signal cutting through the noise. But the most interesting work usually comes from the echoes. You are a repository of every failed attempt at a poem, every blurry photo, and every demo track that never left your hard drive. We often treat our memories like a storage unit that needs to be organized or emptied, but memory is actually more like dust motes dancing in a single beam of light in a dark room. It provides the texture for the air you’re currently breathing. You only notice it when the light hits a certain way, but it is always there, giving your present moment its weight and its grit.
There is a specific kind of dignity in acknowledging the “archive” of your own failures. Living in a city where the winter forces us into long periods of isolation, it is easy to get stuck in a loop of spectral “what ifs.” What if you had moved to a bigger city? What if you had taken that corporate gig instead of sticking with the studio? These questions are just shadows moving across the floor of your mind. They are as persistent as the sound of the trains shunting in the CP yards at 3 AM—a low, industrial haunting that tells you the world is still moving while you wait for a breakthrough.
Kindness to yourself looks like giving your past versions a place to sit at the table. You don’t need to exorcise the parts of you that feel “cringe” or outdated. Those fragments are the very things that give your current work its resonance and its depth. When you create from a place of spectral awareness, you aren’t just making something for the “now.” You are participating in a long, echoing conversation with every person who stood on this same patch of prairie mud before you were even a thought. You are building a bridge out of the very dust of your previous attempts, and that bridge is stronger for its complexity.
The creative soul in Winnipeg isn’t a polished stone; it is a porous surface. It is about letting the past bleed through the present until the layers become a rich, complicated accumulation of experience. You aren’t losing time; you are accumulating history. Every time you pick up a camera or a pen, you are summoning all those ghosts to help you hold the weight of the current moment. It is okay if the final result is a bit blurry or out of focus. The most honest things are often the ones that refuse to be pinned down by a single, sharp definition.
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