If you’ve ever thought about ghosting someone, don’t. I mean it. It is honestly one of the most inconsiderate things you could do to a person. I know this because I was ghosted.

And I felt like I didn’t even exist because of it.

“Pinch me,” I’d tell my friends jokingly. “Am I actually here right now?” It all felt like a horrible nightmare. One that I wished I could press a rewind button on in order to go back months before I ever met him.

For me, being ghosted was the worst thing any boy had ever done to me. Here was this person who knew everything about me, and he didn’t even want to stay friends. What did that say about me? I wondered.

I was an angry, sad mess. Sure, some boys have seemed to be non-caring or in it for the hook-up, but at least their intentions were clear.

There was no warning with this one. I didn’t even realize I had been ghosted until one day I messaged him and there was no response. I tried another time about a week later, asking what I had done wrong and I got the smallest response. According to him, conversation had become weak. Then, I wrote an even longer message and he responded that he was sorry and I “deserved better.” To top it all off, he flew across the country to where I live and didn’t even tell me. It was then I understood. This kid wanted nothing to do with me. He made me a ghost.

And for the record, being told you deserve better is such a cliché. If I deserve better then shouldn’t that person want to be with me? Shouldn’t he think highly of me and want to spend time with the woman who is going to enrich his life? You would think so, but that wasn’t the case. He was telling me what he thought I wanted to hear, when it was all complete bullshit.

I know I deserve better. I wouldn’t ghost a person. I wouldn’t dismiss someone from my life out of the blue. I wouldn’t take the cruel, coward’s way out.

Yes, any person who chooses to ghost is a coward because it means he didn’t have the courage to end it grandly. Instead, he crept out of my life quietly, probably hoping that I’d do him a favor and forget his number.

He lacks respect for women. He doesn’t care about a girl’s feelings. He only cares about himself. He doesn’t talk about the problems he’s having with people. He avoids them. Kind of like how he avoided telling me he met someone new. A girl, who he would fly across the country for, while I blindly tried to fix problems he had already moved on from.

I happened to walk by them playing tennis together. I had only found out the night before that he was in town. They looked so happy – laughing together, carefree. The exact opposite of how I felt after a night of binge drinking and zero sleep. Everything in me wanted to walk up to him and curse him out, but I kept my head to the ground and sauntered along like the ghost I had become.  

It stung. Heck, it still stings.

Not only did I feel disposable, I felt nonexistent. I felt not worth anyone’s time. I felt stupid. I felt dead.

That’s what happens when you make someone your ghost.