with Julie Brown I am here for the apples and cinnamon and pumpkin spice lattes. I am here for the ghost stories 👻 and witches 🧙♀️ and tricks and treats. I am here for the skeletons 💀 in people’s yards, the pumpkins 🎃, the mums, the ridiculous amount of money grown adults are apparently willing to spend on decorative gourds. But even more than all of that, I am here for the costumes. Halloween is a BIG DEAL around these parts. Our neighborhood has a Halloween party every year and we COMMIT. There have been astronauts and fighter pilots and witches and sharks and disco balls and Día de los Muertos and Cruella de Vil. The dogs have been dragged into it. There have been wigs and face paint and costumes that took weeks to put together. There has been an unreasonable amount of fog machines. And I love every ridiculous second of it. But the other day, looking through pictures from Halloween parties over the years, I started thinking about what costumes actually allow us to do.
Because technically, Halloween is the one night a year when we’re all given permission to pretend to be someone else. But I wonder if it’s actually one of the few nights when we give ourselves permission to be MORE of ourselves. Think about it. People who would NEVER walk into a party wearing a wig, thigh-high boots, a cape or a full NASA jumpsuit suddenly don’t think twice about it. We paint our faces. We dance. We pose for ridiculous pictures. We talk to strangers. We make complete asses of ourselves. And nobody worries about being too much. Nobody is standing in front of the mirror thinking, Is this witch hat coming on a little strong? IT’S HALLOWEEN. The entire point is to commit. And maybe that’s why we love it so much. The costume gives us cover. For one night, we get to stop editing ourselves quite so much. We can be louder. Weirder. Bolder. More playful. More dramatic. We can walk into a room looking absolutely ridiculous and instead of wondering what everyone is thinking about us, we think, WAIT UNTIL THEY GET A LOAD OF ME! Which makes me wonder, why the hell do we need the costume? Why is it easier to talk to the person we don’t know when we’re dressed like Maverick? Why is it easier to dance when we’re wearing a wig? Why are we suddenly willing to be silly when everyone else looks equally ridiculous? Maybe the costume isn’t actually hiding us. Maybe it’s removing the thing that normally does. The self-consciousness. The overthinking. The little voice wondering whether we’re being too loud, too weird, too enthusiastic, too MUCH. So yes, this Halloween, wear the costume. Put on the wig. Paint your entire face. Dress your dogs as Star Wars characters even though they very clearly did not consent. COMMIT TO THE BIT. But when November 1st rolls around and you take all of it off, maybe don’t put ALL of yourself away with it. Keep a little of the person who didn’t care what anyone thought. Keep the person who walked into the party and talked to someone new. Keep the person who danced. Keep the person who was willing to look ridiculous. Keep the person who was a little louder, a little weirder, a little bolder. Because maybe that’s not your costume at all. Maybe that’s you. Respond and show me your favorite Halloween get up! 👻
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