Sarah Ellis is a writer and mental health advocate based in Burlington. A Windham County expatriate, she addresses mental illness, resilience, and hope in her newsletter, "Composted Mayhem," at sarahrebeccaellis.substack.com.
BURLINGTON-How do you dress up your fear for Halloween?
Mine is tucked beneath a swashbuckling hat and beaded onto a gold chain I looped around my neck - part of my pirate queen costume I found for $8 with two plastic buckles and a sash. It's a great costume, but still, my fear glows and splinters and keeps catching the light. It won't go away.
When I was 14, my high school band marched in the Horribles Parade, a snaking line of raggedy children dressed as elves or superheroes or strange creations of cardboard if their parents were ambitious and didn't believe in store-bought costumes. (Those kids tended to not have TVs.)
I hadn't yet got the memo that Halloween was when you become sexy, so I smeared my face with white paint, put on my mom's polar fleece and a Dr. Seuss hat, and became the decidedly unsexy Cat in the Hat. When I arrived, I was greeted by sexy spiders and sexy frogs and sexy fire hydrants. I wanted to hide in the gutter.
I never spoke my fear aloud those days, but it was there, buried in my bones - fear of not understanding jokes, of saying my favorite band out loud and no one knowing who they were. Fear of illness and death and war. Fear of being alone.
And, that day, fear of looking foolish as I marched down the street with my striped, sky-high hat and unzipped heart.
In other words, fear of being alive.
* * *
Then, decades have passed, it's July 5, 2025, the day after the Big Beautiful Bill has passed, and I'm at my favorite local café where I go to stave off loneliness and "work on my dialogue," i.e., listen to unblemished college students spill out their insides for their equally unblemished friends to hold in their open hands.
"Any asshole can open up a haunted house," says a woman in a plaid miniskirt and red cowboy boots, and with a posture like she's being suspended from the ceiling. "It was the weirdest era of my life."
And now I'm in the weirdest era of my life, where fear isn't just in my bones, it's in my brain and my heart and every second of every day. Still, I won't give it a name - it's too flimsy and silly and embarrassing to invite in.
So it takes root in my marrow and becomes a thrumming part of me, just below the surface. It tries to get the last word.
* * *
Now I'm thinking of how, if I asked most people in the United States whether they want to spend more time hanging around with fear, they'll say, "Ummm, no thanks, I'd rather suck slugs, you can find your own way home."
And I write on Halloween, of all days, when we expect horror and chills and iridescent blood. I think it's time to barricade the door.
But then I scoop gooey insides from pumpkins and light a candle to illuminate the dark. I step into the night for fistfuls of candy and I dress up as what scares me.
I remember what it's like to look fear in the face and to give it a name, to let myself be scared to death and keep marching anyway.
I remember that a night full of fear is also a night full of stars, that I can excavate fear from my bones and instead walk alongside that murky, snaking river, that coiled up grease. I can still find my way home.
We can still find our way home.
This Voices Essay was submitted to The Commons.
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