(Written mostly on Monday, Oct. 30) I love Hallowe’en. My “favourite holiday” is a bit of a moving target, but Hallowe’en often appears in the crosshairs. (Other contenders include the secular part of Christmas and also whichever one is coming up next.)
I hate being scared. I really do. I take no joy in haunted houses, think jump scares are one of the worst things ever occur to a filmmaker, and I think that as an adult I might like The Nightmare Before Christmas but I’ve never seen the whole thing after, as a kid, getting too scared by the intro to watch the rest of it.1 I do love the more benign decorations. Rubber bats, the kind of fake spiderwebs that are safe for wildlife, ghosts hanging from trees, amusing tombstones, etc. Pumpkin carving was always one of my favourite parts of October. I’ve carved probably more Star Wars characters than I can think of.
Mostly I love the costumes. After all, is anything more fun than pretending to be anything other than the person you (usually) are and sometimes would rather not be? I’ve put on (and off again), over and over again, fairy princess, Princess Leia (repeatedly – a great many years have seen a version of this), Princess Buttercup, Éowyn, even the occasional non-princess. Dressing up has always been really important to me.
In recent years, my interest has cooled somewhat. Partly, I think, because I live in an apartment building where trick-or-treating is replaced by a little party for the kids, and we don’t belong to any kind of group of friends that might, say, have a party anymore. Nor do we actually really go out at night, anyway. We go to sleep at night. So we don’t even see much in the way of costumes, and our costumes certainly wouldn’t be seen. We moved from costumes to Hallowe’en-themed t-shirts.
At first the t-shirts were a last resort. We were running out of time to come up with costumes that we could afford to make and time to make them. So we used fabric paint to put “TRICK” and “TREAT” on a pair of black tees. Then those were replaced with “BATS HOW I LIKE IT” tees from Old Navy which, I’ll be honest, at first felt like even more of a cheat move. Oh, I also have glow-in-the-dark bat earrings so, okay, at least I’m coordinated.
But this year, I don’t even feel the need to dress up in a costume that I would have felt even a year or two ago.2 I’m even, almost, looking forward to the bat t-shirts.3 I think there are probably a lot of factors influencing that feeling, ranging from exhaustion (I’ve been having trouble sleeping most of this year, and there’s been a lot going on) to disillusionment and disappointment (whatever happened to Hallowe’en parties?). But one interesting factor is that, this year, I find that I don’t desperately want to be someone else.
“Comfortable in my own skin” might be going a little far,4 but let’s say I’m feeling “comfortable in my own brain.” I’ve gotten to know myself better in the last year than ever before, and I don’t feel that old sense of wanting to escape from myself anymore. I’ve been identifying more elements of my personality, narrowing down what some of my struggles are, and realizing that whoever I am, it’s okay to be that person.
So this year, for my (current) favourite holiday, perhaps I’m dressing up as my best self. Comfortable in my own brain. Doing things that scare me because they are worth doing. Somehow eating a little less candy.
Nobody’s gonna recognize my costume this year.
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1 My preferred Hallowe’en movie would be Rocky Horror, make of that what you will.
2 Although I’m sure I would still enjoy dressing up.
3 At time of posting I will actually be looking BACKWARD AT the bat t-shirts, rather than FORWARD TO.
4 I can’t pretend I don’t want to lose a few pounds. A lot of few pounds. I’d also like my face not to look like a potato. But that’s a different discussion.