The Fourteenth Year//October 186th, 2022

 It’s probably safe to say that I didn’t exactly “come of age” in the normal way, like you see portrayed in media.

I’m thirty-four years old and still very much a “kid” in a lot of ways, some good, and some, admittedly, not so much. I’ve never had the same interests or priorities as “normal” people, and spend more time than I care to admit thinking I’m just simply not cut out for “adulthood” in the traditional sense, When I was much younger, I actually just assumed that either somehow things would magically fall into place, or I’d somehow end up dead before I ever had to deal with any of it. (Yes, I’ve always been on the morbid side. And, for the record, I didn’t have any specific thoughts on how I’d end up dead; I really wasn’t suicidal or anything. I just could never picture myself as a functioning adult and started thinking that maybe I wasn’t ever intended to make it that far.)

However, I am mostly happy with who I am today, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately that, while it wasn’t your typical “coming-of-age” story, I did actually have a year that played a very pivotal role in who I ultimately have become: The year that I was fourteen.

I turned fourteen on September 8th, 2001. Three days later, 9/11 happened. This was a truly life-altering event, and, as one of my teachers told us all we would that day, I still remember every detail, right down to what I was wearing. (An aqua-blue long-sleeved t-shirt with a little heart inside a rainbow on it, and jeans that I thought matched it will, with colorful hearts embroidered on them, both from Old Navy because that’s literally where all my clothes came from, from seventh through ninth grades. It felt safe, somehow, because it was a name brand yet the clothes were very blah and not attention-grabbing. My family often referred to me as a “Walking Billboard” for the company, as I truly did not own a shirt that didn’t say “Old Navy” on it somewhere.) I was a high school freshman, adjusting to yet another anxiety-inducing change, after finally having settled into middle school the year before, and then came an event that set the whole world on edge. The entire country basically started perpetually looking over our shoulders. I still don’t think anything’s felt quite the same since that day.

For those first couple of weeks, it was nearly impossible to think about anything else. There were constant questions in my mind, such as Am I safe if I go to school today? Are my relatives safe at work? Is something else going to happen? For someone with as much as anxiety as I’ve always had even just on a normal day, it was very, very rough.

 But one little saving grace came in the form of the Disney Channel randomly and suddenly offering free services, as it was still a premium subscription channel that we didn’t get in my house at the time. At last, there was something to watch on TV besides the news. Though some people might argue that fourteen was outside the Disney Channel target audience, it became my solace. And, somewhere within that time frame, they started advertising Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge. 

Seeing that commercial suddenly jolted me back to my own reality. In a similar way to what happened with Winky in 1999, it suddenly hit me that, despite everything else that was going on, Halloween was still coming. While, as I said previously, the world never quite went back to the way it was before 9/11, in that moment, I found my “normal” again.

Sadly, the Disney Channel freebie ended before I would’ve been able to watch either Halloweentown movie. (I believe it was actually pulled the very morning of the day that the original Halloweentown was supposed to re-air.) But the inspiration that came with seeing the ads for those movies stayed with me, and excited me even more than normal. I was, obviously, always into Halloween, from the time I was four, but I believe that age fourteen was the year I truly “leveled up” and started to become what I am now.

I actually bought my costume from the “adult” section of Party City for the first time that year. I don’t remember what compelled me to do so; if I truly believed the kids’ costumes would no longer fit, or I just spotted some I liked better on the adult side, but this was a big deal to me. I used to spend hours poring over the Party City Halloween ads each year, even after I’d already chosen my costume, and I always wondered what I would be when I became an “adult”. It always saddened me that the adult section seemed so much smaller than the kids’, so I was pleasantly surprised when I had no issue choosing a costume from there. However, because I was now in high school, and had graduated to adult size costumes, people, particularly family members as I was already lying at school, (I wasn’t going to risk anything after the Cinderella Incident.) were starting to bring up the subject of when I would stop trick-or-treating. This was, oddly enough, something I’d never really thought about before. I tried not to let it bother me, as obviously no one was expecting me to stop right then, but I wasn’t happy to make the realization that I’d chosen a favorite holiday that seemingly had an age limit. Waiting a year was had enough. Having to put Halloween on a shelf, like an unwanted baby’s toy in a teenager’s room, was a thought I could truly never process. To this day, the fact that people outgrow Halloween honestly baffles me.

As proof that I was still very much a kid at this point in time, there was this Halloween Barbie  doll that I found in a local grocery store one night and really, really wanted. I couldn’t understand why my mother wouldn’t let me buy it, even after I’d managed to save the allowance money. It turned out that Aunt Trish had seen it, and the doll’s witch costume looked so much like the one that I’d picked out that year, that she’d bought it and planned to surprise me with it as a “Great Pumpkin” gift on Halloween. I felt terrible when she wound up having to give it to me early, in order to stop the feud between my mother and myself over her refusal to let me buy the doll when I had the money! (I’ve always taken major offense to being told I was “too old” for dolls and likely assumed this was what was happening.)

This also turned out to be the first year I wouldn’t use my beloved Casper pail. Because my witch costume was orange and black, I saw it as an excuse to finally get one of those “inverted” pumpkin pails, where the pumpkin is black and the facial features are orange, that had started appearing a few years before. I’d always been in love with them, but I couldn’t come up with an excuse to buy one. As a young girl shopping on allowance and maybe a little birthday money, every penny was precious and had to be spent on just the right things when it came to Halloween, and since I already had a pail I loved so much, I couldn’t see a reason to buy a new one. I guess this was me trying to be a “fashionable teenager”? Count on me to start caring about matching, only when it came to Halloween. Perhaps this is why I dress only in Halloween attire now; it’s the only way I can bring myself to care! I was sad, though, that the only inverted pail I could find that year was a more goofy-faced one, not the traditional style. It took long enough even to find that one, and I distinctly remember my mother having to perform some interesting tricks to knock it down off a high shelf. I don’t think I was ever fully satisfied with great pail, but regardless, my Halloween was coming together nicely.

(The pail in question. Not my original one, as all my old Halloween stuff mysteriously disappeared in my late teens, but iconic nonetheless. I’m flooded with memories of that fateful year when I look at him.)

Then, exactly a week before Halloween, my grandfather died. My grandfather and I had a very close relationship. He honestly may as well have been my father, and also on some level, an older brother of sorts. He lived with us from the time I was a toddler, and we shared many interests (my artistic side and collecting habits are 100% him), and he was always willing to do things with me when no one else was, whether it was play a game, go for a walk, watch a movie, or just have a conversation. He’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s about three years prior to his passing, and to say I had trouble processing it would be an understatement. Somewhere in my mind I just kept hoping that he’d be the first person to somehow make a full recovery from it. A few nights before he died, he seemed more lively than usual and I rode home from the hospital that night, shotgun in my aunt’s car, clutching a Halloween hair clip that had been falling out of my hair,  naively hoping that the nightmare I’d been enduring for three years was finally coming to an end. On some level it was, just not in the way I’d hoped. I finally had to face it, after three years of denial, and it remains one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Twenty years and change later, most days it still feels like it happened yesterday.

I threw myself even more fully into Halloween than usual after that. I needed it, more than I ever had before. That was the one and only period of time I actually said “screw it” to what the other kids would think, and wore Halloween-themed outfits (ironically mostly still from Old Navy) to school every day after the funeral and through Halloween itself. I actually got a fair amount of compliments and wish my teenage self had had the courage to keep the momentum going. (I did briefly consider “going goth” before sophomore year but chickened out. That is honestly one of my biggest regrets in life. I’ll never not feel like I lost the supposed “best years of my life” pretending to be someone I wasn’t, while not even being sure what role I was trying to play.) It was a difficult time, but Halloween still came. It was still there to comfort me through the worst pain I’d experienced, almost as if the universe was trying to distract me from my grief.

This is one of very, very few costumes I actually have a picture of myself wearing, and you can tell from my bright smile here how happy I was. This costume, called Gothic Witch, with its orange-and-black color scheme, truly made me feel like the epitome of Halloween. (Although, if I could do it all over again, I’d probably put on some makeup and ditch those weird, obviously fake dollar store hair extensions. But at least my bangs were starting to grow out here, finally.) I’m also pretty sure that in the wrong lighting, you could make out that the shirt I’m wearing underneath said “Old Navy” on it, to my annoyance.

I don’t remember too many details of that actual Halloween night, save for a little girl who was convinced she knew me when I’d never met her before that night, and making the mistake of grabbing at my witch hat with the hand I was holding my pail with, thus smacking myself in the head with it, I but I know it was a good night.

Not only because it was Halloween, but because after that night, my post-Halloween depression hit its absolute high. I’m always at my lowest when Halloween is over, but that year I took it hard. 

I immediately started counting down the days until Halloween 2002. I wanted next to nothing to do with Thanksgiving or Christmas that year, the latter completely baffling everyone around me. After a particularly interesting argument with my parents, about something to do with my grinchy behavior, though I don’t exactly remember what, I wrote a poem that I actually remember every word of:

I know not more than my holiday,

No less than the pumpkin glows.

I’m only here for the time of bliss,

Then silenced when it goes.

Still might be some of my best work, honestly. I wrote it on a napkin in Sharpie and doodled Halloween characters all around it. This was just one of many sad poems I wrote within that year, all of them a desperate attempt to express the longing I felt in between Halloweens, and how Halloween was the only thing that truly made me feel safe and happy. It was such a difficult thing for my teenage brain to put into words, but I spent many evenings trying. I even, at one point, rewrote one of my favorite songs at the time, Anticipating by Britney Spears, to be about Halloween night. I have, sadly, spent much of the past week or so trying to remember the lyrics I wrote, but unfortunately all I remember is that it started with “Bucket, in my hand. Lookin’ in the mirror and I’m checkin’ out my witch hat…” and the chorus was something along the lines of  “I’ve been anticipating, this is my night, I’m saying. I wanna trick or treat! The feeling is right, it’s Halloween night!” There also was another song, a cover of Can You Stand The Rain, that I tried to turn into “Can You Stand November 1st?” I guess it’s safe to say I was dwelling on my misery that Halloween was over, but this was the first year that I remember truly allowing myself to explore how I felt, how deep my love for Halloween was, and how much I truly needed it to be happy; to be myself. 

It became more and more evident to me as that year went on, that Halloween was just simply essential to me. Most evenings I would sit in my room either writing about my love for Halloween, through the aforementioned poems and songs, and also through this weird little memoir I started writing trying ti describe in detail what Halloween meant to me. I worked on it for years and was constantly adding to it, and I wish I still had it now. The notebook that these things were written in also had “I <3 Halloween” scrawled all over the cover, similar to what “normal” girls would do when they had crushes. (Strange sidenote, I actually did have a crush at the time, but he moved a couple of weeks into the school year and then this strange rumor started going around that he’d been shot at his new school. I don’t remember who I heard it from and I’ve never been able to find any evidence that such a thing happened, anywhere. No one ever went as far as to say he died, but he seems to have fallen off the face of the earth as I’ve never been able to find him on social media or anything. Unsolved Mysteries, where you at?) I believe this was also the first year I started really allowing myself Halloween-y things in the off-season, like watching movies, flipping through October issues of magazines that were laying around, etc. I wouldn’t start actually leaving decor up until I was closer to adulthood, but I did have these “Trick Or Treat” scented candles from Yankee Candle that I would occasionally go into my closet and sniff when I really, desperately, needed to be transported back to Halloween night. To this day I’ve never found a scent that hits in quite the same way. 

That year, when spring seemed to come on suddenly one morning while I was walking to the bus stop, I felt a sudden burst of hope. I looked at the green leaves, really looked at them, and could see reflections of autumn inside them. I hoped that the fall season would come just as quickly. Perhaps it was morbid of me to start wishing for something’s demise after it had just been reborn, but it gave me such hope to see how quickly they’d bloomed. Winter always feels like that long, hopeless time immediately after fall’s end, and seeing the suddenly green leaves that morning reminded me that the seasons do change, and my time always comes around again.

And, of course, it did come back around. After a year of longing, but also a year of coming to terms with and understanding the longing, Halloween rolled around once more, proving to me that no matter what else happened throughout the year, it would always be there. 

I don’t think I truly understood the comfort of that constancy, and the need for Halloween to be a part of my everyday life, until my fourteenth year. Since then it’s only grown and evolved, as I gradually became comfortable enough to become the person I am now.

Unapologetically me, and unapologetically immersed in Halloween.

Stay spooky, my friends.