Halloween: the endless celebration

My favorite part of Halloween was always the costumes. One night each year, I would pull a plastic Care Bear mask over my face, put glitter in my hair and use my mom's "grown-up" makeup, or use green face-paint and plastic warts. Suddenly I would become Sunshine Bear, or Miss America, or the Wicked Witch of the West. The magic was in the transformation, the fact that I could leave behind the "real world" of my second-grade worries. One could go to the store, search through racks of clown suits, ghost sheets, and witch hats, and simply buy a new identity. That was then, when we were kids.

This is now. We've grown up. People no longer exclaim "How cute!" and hand out Hershey bars if we show up at their door saying "Trick-or-treat!" The masks we don are no longer as magical because we wear them every day. We've overused them; the initial thrill has worn off. We wear our costumes year round, disguises that have lost the luster and wonder of our youths. We interact with mere shadows of people, we sit down and have congenial conversations, mask to mask, one self-imposed facade meeting the other. I wonder how many people I truly know--how many I've spoken with, laughed with, shared with, when all the masks were off. Whether the cards have ever been laid face up on the table, or if it's all been one big poker game, all of us using our game faces out of the fear that the people around us will discover too much about our true thoughts and intentions.

It's all too easy to pretend. The "quietest" people are really the most talkative, the "confident" really the most unsure, the "courageous" really the most fearful. We operate beneath a layer of feigned existence that shields us from the world. Attempting to make the world more understandable--simpler, if you will--we don layers of deception designed to distort reality. We conclude that if others see us in a certain way, then that must be how we really are. We hope that if people perceive us in certain terms, then over time those perceptions will become actuality. We fail to realize that we don't unfold from the outside in, but rather discover ourselves from the inside out.

Admittedly, reality can be frightening. We all say we want the truth, but hate to hear it and deal with it. Masks are the easiest option--they're accessible, readily available. We only have to put them on and we no longer need to present our true faces to the world. We are protected by our thin sheets of plastic, synthetic creations which we pull over our faces, peering through the eye holes.

When I was a kid, I knew nothing except who I was. It didn't matter whether people would judge me or society would condemn me for being different. I said what I thought. I acted on my instincts. I interacted only with those I liked. I dressed only in what was comfortable. I laughed only when I truly thought something was funny.

Now there's no need to buy an identity for Halloween. I can shirk the store-bought costumes for the one that I wear everyday. Each morning, I get out of bed and dress up as "myself."