“We make our own ghosts by looking, but pretending not to see...
and then forgetting ourselves altogether.”

Quote continued below…

The deserted Dhara Devi Hotel symbolizes this chapter of my time in Chiang Mai. It is haunting, beautiful, and captivating. For reasons that were not obvious then, but are now, this space helps me visualize my traumas or the ghosts of my past. I have this desperate longing to explore the grounds, the hallways, and the rooms. To envision what it once looked like in its earlier days and to appreciate what it has become today due to a lack of maintenance and neglect. These days, I wonder if I ended up in this part of the city by choice or design… because I feel strangely drawn to it and have an urge to uncover more.

Some brief history about the hotel because context is necessary.

Opened in 2002, it was once a luxury hotel with Lanna-style architecture. For about 700 years, the Lanna kingdom dominated Northern Thailand, spanning across Xishuangbanna Province in China to Luang Prabang in Laos and some parts of Burma (Thaiger.com). Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, the hotel temporarily closed its doors in early 2020. They filed for rehabilitation, which was denied, and then officially filed for bankruptcy in November 2020 (Thaiger.com). It is up for sale and I wish I could purchase it. I have no idea what I would do with it, but I just do not want to see it torn down if it ever became an option.

The haunting characteristic of this hotel appealed to me but what does it mean? Apart from the supernatural?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines haunting as the following, “having qualities (such as sadness or beauty) that linger in the memory: not easily forgotten“ (Merriam-Webster). Going a step deeper, I want to explore where memory is stored, which we know is the mind that is contained in the brain, which is contained within the skull found in the head of the body. So, with that understood, perhaps we can look at these lingering and not easily forgotten qualities (or feelings) as trauma.

In supernatural terms, trauma would be embodied by ghosts who have a difficult time moving on from a given place. Out of all the horror stories, I am fond of ghost stories because to some extent there is an undeniable truth within the human experience that can only be explored through them. Whether we believe in their existence or not, their lore reveals a lot about how we interpret traumatic events.

Therefore, I will look at the Chiang Mai Saga as a means to learn about my ghosts and sit with them. Eventually, as time goes on, I will release them so they are free from the confines of my mind and body.

“It is a terrible thing to look at oneself

and to all the while see nothing.

Surely this is how we make our own ghosts.

We make them out of ourselves.”

— -I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (Perkins, 2016)

I am reminded, more often than I would care for, that pain is necessary. However, I believe pain is meant to be released, yet so many of us (myself included) hold on to it. Thus, inevitably setting the stage for suffering. It is a feeling and feelings can be transformative. We can shape them into perspective, artistic expressions, lessons, or advice.

But what happens if we hold on for too long and that suffering is absorbed into our essence because we have nothing else to feed our souls? I find myself pondering this a lot… are we really what we eat?

For years I was on a diet of anxiety, sadness, grief, bursts of energy, instability, insecurities, fear, and anger. It clogged my ability to adequately love myself and the people around me.

What does it even mean to love adequately?

For me, it is to hold space for oneself or others and this includes pleasure, discomfort, pain, as well as fears. We do this with compassion because shame will not get us out of our despair. To even learn what this meant beyond theory, I had to understand that I was being haunted.

For years, I could not come to terms with it. How does one even start? What does it take to finally reach the cliff and make the last-minute decision to not jump into an eager abyss? In my case, I had a lot of drastic shifts in my life that revealed just how many incidents I had suppressed and now there was nothing to hold them down anymore. Agonizing memories surfaced and the more I ignored them, the more it affected the relationships around me. I was so afraid of facing the ghosts I had created.

In the paranormal or supernatural world, ghosts are the essence of a person’s life. The part that refuses to let go or accept their passing. They are bound to the place where their demise occurred and it’s where they remain as life goes on around them. Time becomes irrelevant. Some spirits are good and some are malevolent. I suppose it has a lot to do with how much wrath and disdain one carries over into the afterlife. They do not just haunt places, but other beings, typically people, and that includes themselves. Because if we remember the definition of “haunted” it is the feelings that linger on. Therefore, if we use the metaphor of ghosts and apply it to how we understand trauma, then the more we leave it unprocessed, the more we begin to haunt ourselves and the people we come across. For example, generational trauma can be understood as haunting across time.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (Oz Perkins, 2016) - Actress Ruth Wilson and Lucy Boynton

In the 2016 film “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House” directed and written by Oz Perkins, a nurse named Lily moves into the home of an elderly writer. Towards the end of her first year, she learns about the tragic death of Polly. We do not know why she was killed but we learn that it was violent and she was never given a proper burial. Polly’s ghost is not evil per se but just cannot move on. It is only as the protagonist starts to read about her that she finally reveals herself. In the end, this proves to be too much for an already nervous Lily. I find it particularly interesting that we often find ghosts in such predicaments where they are stuck in a loop, either repeating their deaths, not being able to process, or being able to process but not let go of the place.

There is a common saying, “time heals”. I don’t know how true that is because I hold the stance that it is what we do within that time that determines if or HOW we heal. For ghosts, time stops for them but not around them. So we can easily grasp WHY they cannot move forward. We tend to see this in people, who are alive physically, but you can sort of tell the lights have gone out from within or are dimmed down. Their bodies then convert into walking haunted housing in which the “pretty thing” that is their soul or spirit lives.

The greatest contrast —and quite obvious— is that human bodies are not immobile whether spatially or mentally. We have the ability to move and change our environment and perspective. We do not have to let ourselves rot away as old wood in forgotten homes or buildings. More importantly, we are simply not ghosts bound to places that harm us. This is of course not the same as being somewhere by choice or need even though the circumstances can feel binding at times.

I have the spirit of a traveler and moving always came naturally to me. New places brought on a sense of wonder and I temporarily forgot about my problems. As the novelty wore off, the mind slipped back into its conflicted state. I remember having a panic attack in Cancun, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Barranquilla, San Jose, and the list just goes on. It began to dawn on me that I could change my geographic location, but I was always going to be carrying some sort of emotional baggage. That is until I was forced to sit down with myself and sort through it all. Looking back, I was never trying to run away from my problems through traveling, but I was searching for a space to feel safe enough so I could work through them. It is why I preferred long bus journeys because I liked staring out of the window and thinking about my life.

What did I want from it?

What was I meant for?

Where was I going?

How could I change my circumstances?

"And the life that they live is a reflection".

When you grow up in a turbulent environment, while you would do anything for some peace, it is so difficult to unlearn the habits you had to adopt to survive the madness. At the moment, it felt like nothing changed because I would come back to the same chaos and psychological turmoil. Looking back, I think what those long commutes provided was resilience and resistance to my circumstances. Because I kept pushing for my life to get better and to find a semblance of peace.

The mental and physical exhaustion that comes from making that time to deal with yourself is gracious compared to hauling your unmanaged luggage with you. Eventually, you will get stopped and fined for carrying heavy.

What do you mean I cannot bring my chaos on board? It weighs less than 10kg!

No one will even know it’s there…please?

Under the seat then? See? It tucks away just fine!

Circa May 2024 - My face every time I come to terms with doing something "hard". If you're wondering how dramatic I can possibly be. The answer: Do you not know me?

When I lived in Karlsruhe, Germany during the pandemic, I moved around 6 or 7 times in 14 months. I was forced to learn HOW to be alone in that city. What added to my isolation was a failing relationship with someone who also needed to be left alone, the lockdowns, and the Prime Minister of Canada decided it would be a great idea to fine Canadians $2000 just for returning home from travels. So, I stayed in Germany.

F—k that.

That period brought to light just how much I needed some form of stability: financial and residential. For a girl who has moved around her whole life and experienced her parents’ finances giving a whole new meaning to roller coaster rides, this was going to be hard. In the coming chapters, I will dive deeper into my new relationship with doing hard things. Surprisingly, all I had to do was meet someone who gently teased me for doing something that I thought was hard, but for him, it looked easy. I cannot say WHY this bothered me so much because usually I don’t care about what people think.

But I digress and want to emphasize that hard does not mean impossible. It requires a lot of perseverance, resilience…

—my exes will tell you that I had that locked down…

and mental flexibility because you are pushing past your comfort zone. You know, a whole reconfiguration of your attitudes and beliefs. Through some trial and error, I settled on Chiang Mai in 2023. Unfortunately, that did not work out as I had hoped and I plan to unpack that earlier chapter at a later point. Since I was committed to the city through my dental work, I had to come back. Which is precisely how I landed here near the abandoned Dhara Devi Hotel. Well, not precisely because nothing ever works linearly in my life.

I will save that for the next chapter.

To be continued…

May 3rd to May 17 (2024)

Some Visual Takeaways