Halloween Costumes and their Contents

This is my last post of the five months of foreverhaven! I have written publicly on this blog every day for five months now. I had made a pledge, after the last Inkhaven, in which 41 of us wrote every day for one month at the Lighthaven campus, that I would continue to write every day until the next Inkhaven, which starts tomorrow on April 1st. This means that this final post completes my duties to that promise. I have learned a lot, and there will be a post for that. This, however, as a last post might seem a little bit random, so let me explain.

This last post is something that is powered by adrenaline and urgency to get to bed on time. I did not have the courage to write it before, as I wish I had. I have half of the courage I would have wanted for it now, and so writing it as a final post to mark an intentional growth era seems as fitting as anything else.

One of my favorite pieces of writing on substack is Halloween Science Fiction and Fantasy. I had wanted to write my own version, as the author John Encaustum encourages readers in his first essay to play with the structures of essays you like (or dislike!) in various ways, and gives some examples of what he means.

Ever since reading this essay, I wanted to look into what costumes I had worn over the years for Halloween, or other occasions. What did they signify to me? What did I want to become? This felt challenging to look at, and so I waited for a better time.

Spring is coming, and as the sun comes out and as part of Spring Cleaning, it actually feels like a nice inventory to go through previous ways I had been hiding myself or showing myself.

In a way, this is a stream of consciousness writing, which is something I had experimented with in these months as a set of experiments. In another way, this is just trying to write faithfully…what had happened and how I felt about it. And so there is also an interesting integration there.

My first Halloween costume was…Tinker Bell. I had never seen Peter Pan, and the character had no significance to me, but I was very sparkly and I liked being sparkly. I had the green dress, with the intricate layered skirt. I had the wide wings. It was very beautiful, and it suited me. I got a lot of compliments for this costume. I do not have photos, but I was generally a shy and adorable child, and so this would have suited me. I do remember a distinct and very intense self-consciousness about how much of my legs were showing. In hindsight, the skirt was long enough, and no adult ever made a comment about it both because I was too young for it to matter and because everything was indeed fine. I must have been around eight, and although I loved the costume and felt very beautiful, it was not a costume that I had myself chosen, and probably not one that I would have chosen. I wore this same costume for a few years, and was relieved when I got to have a different one. I was relieved, but also confused about the relief. I did not understand my own self-consciousness about the long legs showing. I never had an uncomfortable and painful interaction in this costume that would have created the feelings.

The next costume was a generic witch costume. I wore this one every year for a very long time. This one I did get a part in choosing, in that my parents loved it and I got to approve it. This one came with a hat with a purple-haired wig, and a long black plain dress, and a purple belt, with striped purple and black tights. Everybody really liked this one too. I did not know why. Compared to the Tinker Bell costume it was a lot plainer. Why people liked it so much was a mystery to me, because other girls would be wearing more complicated and more interesting costumes, but people would talk to me as if this was interesting. In hindsight, it just worked very well, and worked a lot better with my natural coloring than most things I wore, and I felt very comfortable wearing it. Over the years, I would have different variations around it. Sometimes I would be too self-conscious to wear the hat and wig, sometimes not. In later years, I created a purple “pimp stick” to bring to school with it. It was a lot of fun.

Next came the Arthur Dent era, from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It did not occur to me that it was in any way strange to want to wear a male character costume. I wanted to come to school wearing a bathrobe, and a towel. I think this was my first costume where I was playing with being “edgy.” I wanted to be seen as the thing I was in costume as. I wanted to be Arthur Dent. The laziness was part of the point. I wanted to be very natural, and for people to see me very natural. I wanted an excuse to be myself. The nerdy iconography was important too. There was a symbolic importance, and the way that the symbol was in conversation recursively with my own reality. I do not remember what comments I got about this one. Of course, some people were really into it. Some people did not get it. On one occasion, at a very large street event, somebody else was also Arthur Dent. But I think part of the point for me with this costume was not really caring what anybody thought about it. I was very thrusty and unapologetic.

Next was…slutty Gregor from Kafka’s metamorphosis. I don’t know man. This was college. It’s not even that I didn’t have a costume. I straight-up ordered enormous googly eyes off the internet to put on my tits, and made a headpiece so that I could have more eyes. I wanted to be absurdist. I wanted people to ask me what I was. I wanted to be slutty something but I didn’t want to be slutty the normal thing. I had to disguise my desire to be slutty. I was having crushes on all these experimental comedy artists. I wanted to be seen and I wanted to be slutty and I wanted to be seen the right way for being slutty. This is probably a costume I would like to redo, in some version, in some spirit, because it made me very happy in my soul. The comments I remember — the people who knew Kafka laughed a lot. A lot of people asked me what I am supposed to be. People were amused by my googly-eyes titties. In a funny way, I think this was the farthest I’d gotten into trying to show up in my feminine, in part because even though it seems like an unhinged joke of opposites (slutty and literary?), it was actually not too far from something like a conscious and integrated feminine. I can imagine ways of taking the feelings for this costume further, and maturing them, and it being really cool.

Next was…Dorothy from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, as part of a Frank and Dorothy couple’s costume. This was my idea. There was a David Lynch themed Halloween party. We didn’t have costumes. We really wanted to go. I insisted we go. I said I “had a blue velvet dress.” He had a leather jacket and some sleep apnea machine parts. If you have seen the movie, you would know that this is a particularly non-neutral and risky costume! Probably the only time to do this would be to a specifically David Lynch halloween party. There was one more Dorothy there at the party, but she did not arrive with a Frank. Frank is famously…not very nice to Dorothy in the film. Very not nice. He famously yells at her and hits her a lot. But we had enormous fun with this. I had not seen the movie when I proposed it, and was watching it right to the last minute while I was preparing my hair and makeup. My suggestion was based entirely on visual pattern-matching and theme matching, and nothing else at all. Dorothy has a similar enough coloring as me, and as I was looking at David Lynch titles for costume inspirations, there was a clear match. But this is David Lynch, and he plays a lot with the unconscious. There was something like an integrated feminine for me in wanting to be Dorothy, because she is beautiful and I wanted to be beautiful. If Slutty Gregor was original and coming from deep impulses inside me, Dorothy was a more straightfoward, seeing something that someone who thought a lot about beauty thought was beautiful and feeling resonances around what inside of myself is like that.

Finally, the last costume I remember was also a couple’s costume. We were going to an out-of-state Halloween party event, again with no costumes. I mentioned “Don’t we have matching different colored Fanta t-shirts?” I went as Orange Fanta. He went as Grape Fanta. It could be argued that we were going to something like a “fantasy” party as two fantas at a fantasy party. When people asked us who we were, we said “The Kennedy’s! John and Jacky!” One man, on seeing my partner’s shirt, exclaimed, “NO way, There’s two of you????” and had the sort of ecstatic and gutteral emotional reaction that our soda t-shirts sometimes have on the unsuspecting public. I do not understand this. The Mountain Dew Baja Blast t-shirt does something to some people.

And now you have it. The full compendium of my Halloween costumes over my life time, as I remember it. There may have been more occasion for costuming, as when I participated in a Roshni showcase which required certain dress. There was a variety of other performances. I remember trying my hardest to dress up as a pirate, once, and only getting halfway to the exact effect. There were probably other parties. But this is what I remember.

Feel free to leave comments analyzing me or the genre of Halloween Costumes, as long as it is either deep or entertaining, go nuts. I myself will probably reread this list and try to see where I can go harder in my own creative future, or do something else entirely. I am noticing there are arcs that are entirely missing. For example, choosing which Disney Princess you want to be, and doing that, seems like an important arc! And I have missed it!