Being an adult: maybe the itchiest Halloween costume

on embracing your inner feral child so they don't run the show

Oct 31, 2024

I adore this painting, Kvlt Ov The Great Pumpkin, by Tin Can Forest. I love the séance-y pose, the cool solemnity, the Eye of Horus, and how funny it is to consider the Peanuts characters really committing to the bit (the bit being ritual worship of the Great Pumpkin, of course).

There’s also something so chilling about a stretched-out kid. Are these adults, or just kids with long legs? I ask myself a lot, in my day-to-day interactions with people of all ages.

Sometimes I think about how Being an Adult is a costume we wear, and how it gets so tight, so itchy sometimes. It can be heavy, or limit our movement. I was never a huge Peanuts head, but I think Charles M. Schulz got it better than most, how kids are not just sweet and profound. At some point, we were all a little feral. The Peanuts kids will say anything to each other. (Especially to Charlie Brown, who somehow provokes everyone’s id by existing.) But at least they own their ugly impulses. Adults have them, too, but have a harder time admitting (even to ourselves) when we feel vindictive-because-bored or what have you.

Along those lines: Did I recently read The Changeling by Joy Williams for the first time? You bet. Eerie, bizarre, it’s a perfect spooky autumn novel, full of feral children.

Halloween marks the halfway point between the autumn equinox (equal day and night!) and the winter solstice (longest night! endless moon!). We turn toward darkness—long, low shadows creeping earlier and earlier into our afternoons—and spend more time “hidden,” more time indoors, under blankets, our limbs and heads covered.

When I have a baffling moment with another person and I’m able to gather my wits, I consider that their feral inner child has taken the wheel. That we think we’re arguing about one thing, but—without the other person or me really knowing it—we’re actually arguing about what a young version of this person wants or needs. I try to notice when my feral inner child takes over in response, with her own old hurts and inconvenient desires. (I have limited success.) We have to notice they’re there to catch them when they’re running the show.

I try to see my own shadow.

(Art by Yumi Sakugawa)

Some of what I’ve seen online about “shadow work” or “embracing your shadow” points toward discovering that you’re so much sexier than you could have imagined— wild, untamable, and proud. But if what you find in your “shadow” is something you’d be happy to dredge up and display to other people (and receive yes, queen compliments about)—that doesn’t seem like the shadow at all, at least not to me.

If you think about your literal shadow, what the sun casts from your body, it’s something that trails behind you, that you can see only from certain angles. That you can never quite touch.

Carl Jung defined our shadow parts as what’s unconscious, repressed, or hidden. These parts are pushed out of our awareness because we don’t want to see them.

Peel back your adult-costume for a minute. What did you get bullied about as a kid? What makes you feel guilty? Embarrassed? Can you look directly at that part of yourself that you hate? Can you do it with curiosity, maybe even some affection? Now that’s spooky.

Halloween provides a fascinating opportunity to engage with what scares us and to transform it by embodying or laughing at our fears. It’s an annual memento mori; acknowledging the inevitability of death can help us better appreciate our lives. Having cake and tea with our demons—a.k.a. the younger versions of ourselves that take the wheel sometimes—can similarly strengthen us, when we’re brave enough to look with curiosity.

Questions/experiments/rituals:

If time and money were no object, what elaborate Halloween costume might you create to embody shadow aspects of yourself? (Feel free to draw this or describe it.) If you didn’t have to name these shadows with words, what could you show? Use the language of symbol. Dream logic. Allusion. What gives the image a special charge for you, whether you can name/explain it or not?
Write a letter to the version of yourself that embarrasses you the most. Maybe it’s you at a certain age, or your current self in certain contexts. But write it from the perspective of a further-removed but loving figure, like if you were your own ancestor looking down upon you, watching this little human try to solve life’s frustrating puzzles. Are you . . . actually adorable?
Write a vignette or short story in which a character believes they understand their own motivations—maybe even argues them to another person—but they are completely wrong. They are lying to themselves. The narration knows it and hints at the truth, but obliquely. A reader must deduce what this character can’t (yet?) see.

Misc.

The Debutiful Virtual Poetry Night I did last month with Megan Pinto and Christian J. Collier was recorded and is now up on YouTube.
Cosmic Tantrum, my forthcoming poetry collection, features a couple of spooky Charlie Brown poems and is available for preorder :)
Angel
Nancy Reddy
hyped this very newsletter to Electric Literature as one of “8 Newsletters to Spark Your Creativity.” If it’s done that for you, I’d love to hear about it!

Curiosity & Ritual

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