To dress as ourselves

A gentle reminder this Halloween

My big brother always got the cool costumes when we were kids. He got to be a super hero or a rugged pirate. I had to be the princess. It was much more likely after the early years that I could inherit his hand-me-downs if I wanted them.

Oh, I desperately wanted them.

It didn’t stop at the costumes. I wanted any of the clothes he had outgrown. Polo shirts, button-ups, jeans… My brother wasn’t in any way cool, but he was still a not-cool boy instead of a very not-cool girl, and so the envy I felt was enormous. “It doesn’t matter,” I overheard my mother say at one point, a side-eye glance in my direction as I proudly wore my brother’s run-down clothes around the house or off to school. I’m sure she thought it was a phase, a blessing in disguise. We didn’t have money for new clothes, so of course it would have been a relief to see me delight in the shirts he had outgrown even if there was some feeling of inappropriateness involved along the way.

Every year, in anticipation of Halloween, I would thrill at the prospect of being something amazing, something exciting and new. Always something boyish or masculine. I could be a Ghostbuster (it was the 80s, and all Ghostbusters back then were men). I could be Ralph Macchio in Karate Kid. I could be Michael J Fox in Back to the Future. I could have been literally any guy in any movie to have even the slimmest chance of dating Molly Ringwald.

And on Halloween night, if only for an hour or two, I could become someone I never had the chance to be in daylight. The other kids made horrific jokes about my costume choices, but they bounced clean off of me every time. For that one night I was something I dreamt of being, and they couldn’t take it from me, because there was an unspoken truce.

On Halloween you can be anything.

I stopped dressing up for Halloween in my teen years. It got too painful to dream. And maybe I thought I was too old for that kind of thing anyway, but deep down I know that I missed that one night a year to express a part of me that was suffocating and lonely.

Here’s the twenty-something-years story loaded with irony: I worked at a restaurant with a bunch of fun friends who were all older than I was. Was I even legal drinking age? It’s hard to say. But they invited me out for the big night to a party at someone’s house in some neighborhood not too far away. I shrugged and said I wasn’t really into dressing up or being silly, and they batted away my shyness with the reassurance that they could find a costume for me. It turned out to be a dress and heels and make-up—they decided I should go as a girl for Halloween. And I thought it was hilarious! I twitched and fidgeted as they dolled me up, and when we got to the party, I instantly knew it had been a mistake. They plied me with cheap booze and stupid games, and I quietly snuck off to a corner on the balcony to wait out the festivities.

“You don’t seem anything like your friends,” one guy came out to smoke next to me. He jutted a thumb over his shoulder at the raucous giggling inside by all the other girls.

“Naw, I’m just pretending,” I said.

“Doesn’t suit you.”

We stood out there for an hour, him chain-smoking, me avoiding everything, both of us casually talking like (I now know) men (and also just plain humans) do. It was the nicest thing possible in a moment where I had unexpectedly dressed in drag and regretted it. It was also the last time I ever tried. Turns out those girls still expected me to be the chivalrous young man I already was; to drive them home in a car that wasn’t mine, to be sober enough to remember their addresses, and to lock the door behind me as I left each one safely in their apartments.

I don’t know what happened to that dress.

I was recently invited to participate in a Halloween get-together, and dressing up was expected. That pulled up so many uncomfortable feelings immediately, and I tried to backpedal. The organizer had no idea why, and I couldn’t bring myself to explain, and eventually I opted to ghost them entirely—the humor of that isn’t lost on me.

When you’ve spent more than half your life dressing up in a costume every single day, the last thing you want to do on Halloween is keep pretending. I have this gift now, this opportunity to show up every day as myself, and I can’t let that go.

Halloween is still one of my favorite holidays each year. We carve pumpkins and put out loads of decorations in the yard, we drive around the neighborhood to see the displays other families set out, we make the rounds for candy with the kids on the big night, we watch The Nightmare Before Christmas and Beetlejuice every year. We let the kids pick out any costume they want, and we delight in their creativity and self-expression.

Me? I think I’ll happily go as myself again this year. Because I have waited a lifetime to be who I am today and every day.

Your trans friend,

Robin