Dear November 1st (and I use the term ‘dear’ as a loose formality),
I have disliked you for as long as I can remember.
You come along every year, obliterate everything that holds meaning for me, and act like it’s no big deal.
You invalidate my feelings, implying that since you are now present, it’s time to just move on and forget about October and Halloween. Maybe even move onto Christmas, which is a true sacrilege as far as I’m concerned. But still you force your way in, demanding attention, and telling me I’m wrong.
There was a girl who used to bully me in school, every day from the time we met in third grade until we graduated. When she came around, any shred of acceptance I felt from my peers immediately faded, because her presence made me an outcast. You remind me of her sometimes. Just as I’m starting to settle into my surroundings, as someone compliments my outfit or decides to have a conversation with me about my genuine interests, you come along and butt in and suddenly my outfit is weird and my interests are stupid and wrong. The only difference with my schoolyard bully was that sometimes, on some few, glorious days, she would be absent.
I pray for your absence every year. I wish on every star, eyelash, dandelion feather, and whatever else I can find that somehow you won’t come, and the days will just continue to reset back to perpetual October, where I am warm and safe and at home in the world, for once in my life. But you always come back, and every year hits harder than the last. Can’t you see that you’re destroying me? Can’t you tell that I just want to live the life that I live in October, every day, in peace? Is that really so wrong?
It’s not wrong at all though, is it? Who are you to tell me that I shouldn’t be myself? That I shouldn’t live as I want to live when I am hurting no one, except maybe your fragile ego? You are, ultimately, no one. You are a box on a calendar masquerading as a demigod, nothing more than a bully who thinks they know how everyone “should” live, when in reality, you know nothing.
There is one thing I never let sink in as a child, when that schoolyard bully would come around. The adults in my life always tried to teach me to ignore bullies and their mindless games, but I didn’t know how.
I am so much older now, though. I’m no longer that little girl who needs the approval of everyone in her class. I no longer wish to wear a certain shirt or part my hair a certain way so that maybe, just maybe, the bully won’t make fun of me that day. I am a human being, who knows what I like, who knows what makes me happy, and who can make the choice to do what makes me happy even if the bully would tell me it’s wrong.
So I woke up this morning, and though you’d beaten me down quite a bit just by bursting in my life once more, I chose defiance, but also happiness. I dressed in an outfit that, in your mind, would have been better suited to yesterday, but you know what? I looked in the mirror and I liked what I saw. Tomorrow I will go outside and take pictures, just as I have for the entire month of October, and the only thing that will have changed is the date.
No, I don’t like that you’re here. I wish you would just stay away and let the world hold onto its October transformation, but if you must come and charm everyone else, I suppose that’s fine. But you will not bully me into being someone I’m not, ever again. I will wake up every morning, from now until the clock strikes midnight on October 1st once again, and contemplate how to make each day feel like my favorite time of year.
Dear November 1st,
Challenge accepted.
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