The Ghostbusters Gap
When you think back on your childhood, what do you see?
Building a tree fort in the woods and staying out until somebody’s parent calling ‘Hometime!’ reached your ears? Riding your bike with reckless abandon around the neighbourhood? Piling into a station wagon, driven by your friend’s parent to watch Ghostbusters II in the theatre for a birthday party?
A lot of these resonate with me and fill me with that warm nostalgic feeling.
Everything, that is, except for Ghostbusters. I wasn’t allowed to watch Ghostbusters.
Why you ask? As the title implies, there were ghosts. Ghosts were evil, and evil came from Satan. And presumably Satan would use Ghostbusters to encourage me to stray from a righteous path.
I’m getting ahead of myself, though, because this story isn’t just about Ghostbusters, Satan, or childhood regrets. It’s about how those early experiences, shaped by strict boundaries, left lasting impressions on how I navigate the world today.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that our sense of self constantly evolves and continues to be shaped by the people we surround ourselves with and by our experiences. We also get better at being adults, and for good reason. We have bills, careers and for many of my peers, raising children or assisting elderly parents occupies an outsized amount of our time.
For some of us, managing our own physical and mental health has shifted from an added benefit to a necessity as we cope with each passing year.
It seems counterintuitive but finding our way forward often means looking back. The person writing this today is the same teenager, the same boy who thought their life would someday look and feel a certain way. It’s one of my responsibilities now, as an adult, to make sense of what that means and find a way to honour that younger version of myself.
How much of your childhood can you still see in your day-to-day? Do you carry those early lessons with you, or have they been left behind with the bikes and forts?
As an adult, I often wonder how much of my childhood still shapes who I am today. Have I made peace with the things I missed out on, or do they continue to influence my choices?
That leads us back to Ghostbusters. Or at least my childhood, whereas Nate Bargatze said, “I had 80s and 90s Christian parents…I had them at their most Christian.” And I did.
Each Sunday morning, we piled into the car and headed off to church to endure a few hours of praise and worship, followed by a sermon.
If that sounds like torture for a young boy who wanted desperately to sleep in and watch cartoons, trust your instincts.
It gets worse, however, as we piled (I might have been dragged) into the car again each Sunday night to do it all over.
But the religious experiences weren’t limited to Sundays, as I grew up being taught that Satan was constantly looking to gain a toehold in my life.
As a result, secular movies, music and much of the culture from the 80’s and first half of the 90’s was largely unobtainable by me.
This lifestyle might have been more tolerable had I been home schooled or grew up in a monastery. Alas, I went to public school with public school friends.
So, when New Kids on the Block released their hit album, Hangin’ Tough in 1988, I heard about it but never actually heard it.
To be clear, my childhood wasn’t tortured. I had two loving parents and got to experience a lot of core childhood memories like the bikes and tree forts.
Some things also, inexplicably slipped through the cracks - 60s music, Archie comics and Star Trek.
But the through-line that persisted for most of my youth, was that anything containing evil, sexuality, the supernatural, or that wasn’t in service of the Lord, wasn’t good for me.
And while there were a lot of other uncomfortable elements from that strict, religious upbringing, my lack of connection to the media and cultural touchstones of that time is something that I still struggle to understand.
I think one of the interesting things cultural outputs like television or music can do is to weave themselves into your life like a soundtrack or marker, pinpointing where you were or how you felt.
You remember who your friends were, and how an album or movie resonated with your experiences or challenges, real or imagined.
I’ve written before about nostalgia and balancing my desire to savour the past with the necessity to thrive in the present.
While I am cautious about not dwelling too much in the past to find relief from today’s struggles, there is a sense of loss I feel for that cultural detachment in my youth.
Especially reflecting on how amazing it felt when, in high school, the curtain of strict religious rules began to lift.
Some of the shared experiences with my friends around books, music and movies are among the fondest memories I have and formed a valuable foundation for a lot of the interests I’ve cultivated as I’ve aged.
A few of my friends have felt drawn back to church as adults, or even for the first time.
And while I haven’t attended a church service in decades, there remains an element of faith and spirituality within me.
That sense of faith, though no longer tied to formal services or rituals, still provides a quiet guide in my life. It’s less about dogma now and more about finding moments of stillness, reflection, and something bigger than myself.
Whether it’s through a sunrise, a meaningful conversation, or simply being present in the world, I feel that connection to something spiritual – just in a way that fits more comfortably into my life as it is now.
But looking back on my younger self, I don’t think it was ultimately beneficial to have been sheltered from the world to the extent I was.
If I could leave my younger self a message, it would be as simple as this quote from the American writer and theologian Frederick Buechner:
‘Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.’
In a similar spirit, Frederick also beautifully encapsulates a message to myself today:
‘If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.’
Maybe it’s time I finally watch Ghostbusters – because if adulthood teaches us anything, it’s that we can embrace both the things we missed and the things we’ve held onto.
Core childhood memory of Stephen holding a fish he caught, before Tinder made it uncool.
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