Halloween Haunts: Healing Halloween
Halloween Haunts: Healing Halloween
By Lauren Drinkard
A Child of the 80’s
Being a first model Millennial (1981) my love of all things spooky and haunted started as a young child. My gateway drugs were Hellraiser, Nightmare on Elm Street, Evil Dead, Child’s Play, Dracula, Pet Sematary, and Misery. I was just as influenced by my generation’s young adult horror books: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, The Halloween Tree, Goosebumps, and The Witches. Dark thrillers and evil plots had become part of my DNA.
Like most parents, my mom also heavily influenced me. She is a water sign, so naturally, she had an affinity for the spiritual side of the world. As children she would take us to cemeteries and find the oldest, dirtiest headstones to clean, leaving the names legible after years of neglect. She was also a professional clown who loved Halloween–it was her favorite holiday. In the months leading up to Mom’s most revered holiday, my brother and I would go through a hundred different potential costumes. We would run down the hallway, drag out our mom’s white grease kit, and bring it to her for full makeup. She was always happy to paint our faces with whatever movie character we requested. Halloween quickly became my favorite time of year with Pim the Clown at the helm.
Coming from a family with many sisters and little income our outfits were primarily sourced from neighboring children who had outgrown their clothes. One family in particular had a set of five girls who were all older than us. Instead of taking their not-so-gently used clothes to a thrift store, they would bring trash bags of mismatched jeans and shirts to our home. My older sisters always got first dibs and the remaining items were mine, resulting in a terrible wardrobe that garnered unwanted attention from local bullies. Halloween became important to me for another reason. It was a sanctuary from my embarrassment of ill-fitting outfits and a chance for me to blend in with other kids in scary costumes that they envied (thanks to Pim), even if just for one day.
Drifting Away
As a teenager, my love of otherworldly ghost stories and weird costumes spilled into other facets of my life, predominantly music. Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, and The Offspring were some of my favorites. This and my love of the Halloween holiday did not help me earn any friends in my small Christian community. The teenage girls at my high school wore Sunflowers perfume while I was drenched in clove incense. They went to overnight Friday church lock-ins while I went to the movie theaters to watch R-rated films and make out with my boyfriend. As the intensity of the school curriculum increased so too did the bullying I dealt with for my everyday interests.
No one was more excited for high school graduation than me. While everyone seemed to have plans for marriage or college, I was turned around about my next steps. I was lost, so I did what all lost teenagers do–absolutely nothing. I spun in circles for two years until I realized I was headed nowhere. I realized I needed to take charge of my future and not waste more time. I was tired of being an outcast, tired of being bullied, and simply wanted to fit into mainstream society. Whether or not I understood my motivations at that time, I associated my being bullied with my interests in subculture, which included Halloween. All of it had to go.
I enrolled in college and took Anthropology 101 with a bright future as an attorney in mind. I graduated with an Associate of Communications, and a Bachelor of Psychology, and started my own front-end application consulting business. I only invested in people, experiences, and next steps that I was sure would take me far from my past, away from being bullied, and closer to being an accepted member of mainstream society.
I let my love of Hellraiser die. I destroyed my beloved The Offspring SMASH album with a hammer in my driveway and pulverized the other CDs that raised me through my teenage years. I threw away my black clothes and treasured combat boots and started to buy blouses and high heels. I was fully committed to my transformation. I went on to earn a Master of Public Health with a concentration in Biostatistics, and another Master of Liberal Arts with a concentration in Creative Writing, this time from an Ivy League school. I spent whatever free time I had learning everything I could about data science and artificial intelligence (AI).
I quickly rose in my career publishing scientific papers on healthcare management, disease states, and emerging technology. In 7 years I went from Associate Director to Senior Vice President by working hard and accruing certificates from Duke, Harvard, and MIT. I became an expert on cloud servers, computing, and AI. Every time I found myself wanting to spend the day in a cemetery reading Edgar Allen Poe, I would go to the library and study mathematical functions instead. And I sure as hell didn’t celebrate Halloween. That person was dead–I made sure of it.
Healing Halloween
Three years ago I survived my third near-death experience–I was mowed down by a speedboat going full speed while I was kayaking in the Caribbean Ocean. Drunk driver. I was unsettlingly close to my end. I physically survived but I nearly lost everything I had professionally worked for and simultaneously took a series of major personal blows. While I was two months into my mandatory bed rest for my severe injuries, my husband of three years told me he had been cheating on me. One week later he moved out and we never spoke again–my partner vanished, brutally.
Amid my angst and grief, Pim the Clown picked me up one cold, winter Saturday morning for a road trip. She drove me to southern Ohio where we visited the towns, churches, and schools my Welsh and German ancestral family established. Not surprisingly, we have entire family cemeteries dating back to the 1700s. During that trip, something was triggered deep in my memory bank. I remembered how beautiful, delicate, and important cemeteries were to me. I remembered the lyrics to Hole’s Miss World. I remembered my love of Halloween.
I didn’t stop at remembering. I came home that day and for the first time in ages, wrote ghoulish poetry that made even Hell miss me. I made new playlists of my favorite 80s and 90s songs to listen to at the gym. I used my expertise in AI prompt engineering to give me ideas on pushing through my writer’s block. I went to my first Halloween party in over twelve years and dressed up as Miss Argentina from Beetlejuice. My entire being started to come back to life, and I was finding joy and glee in places I had long forgotten.
But with that joy emerged a new threat–my fear of being ostracized by my professional network for not protecting my polished, executive presence. Corporate America is not exactly known for being a friendly place for spooky Halloween lovers who write stories about possessed ravens. So I hid my newfound growth afraid I would damage a part of my life I had worked so hard for. I kept hidden my writing about hideous witches, toxic zombie exes, and cemeteries.
I hid until I couldn’t, and from some unknown internal motivation, I decided it was time to set myself free.
I created a social media account (until then, I had zero online presence besides LinkedIn and scientific journals) and began generating posts reflecting my interests. I created a Medium account for my poetry and prose. I started hanging out with local horror lovers, bibliophiles, screenwriters, and poets. I joined the Horror Writers Association. I started to share all of myself with the world instead of just the parts of me that I thought would be accepted.
Do you know what happened? Nothing. Instead, I found a groundswell of support in my newly expanded social circles. I was starting to feel like ME.
This year I am going to a Columbus-based Halloween party with my boyfriend who happens to be a screenwriter. He is going as Hannibal Lecter and I am going as Clarice. He insisted he be allowed to recite the lines “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.” When planning our outfits, deciding on roles, and practicing our lines, he charmingly referred to me as The Queen of Halloween. Unexpectedly, I broke down into tears and started ugly crying. It was the first time I had been seen for my love of macabre stories and my favorite holiday of the year.
Like many other deep thinkers and seekers of the world, my path to finding and embracing my complete self has been difficult. I have often been made to believe that I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t smart enough, didn’t drive the right car, or wear the right clothes. I let seeds of doubt that others had planted overtake some of the most important parts of who I was. It took a near-death experience between myself and a speedboat for me to realize I had spent my entire adult life only halfway activated, instead of embracing what was mine all along.
As Frank from Donnie Darko said, “Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?”
Happy Halloween, my fellow friends.
Lauren Drinkard is a spiritual being at heart, having lived a life of wild vulnerability and curiosity in the world. Her work can be found on her blog https://medium.com/@l3769426.
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