I love halloween. It’s my favorite time of year. There’s something about the change of the leaves, the smell of pumpkins, and an excuse to dress up as someone different for just a few hours.
In the spirit of halloween, I recently paid good money to be chased and horrified through a haunted house. When my group and I started walking, I noticed that somehow, I was the one apologizing to the scare actors. One would leap out of the dark and lunge right at me, and I would catch myself saying “oh my god, I’m sorry!”
On the way home, I started to wonder, what did I have to be sorry for? Being in a haunted house that I paid to be at? Simply existing within a short radius of a man holding a chainsaw? I started to realize that even in the face of fictional death, my first response was to apologize and make sure that others around me were comfortable.
The more I thought about it, the more I started to realize that I had learned to apologize for taking up space so instinctively that even the terror of a haunted house couldn’t shake that habit. Yet, it isn’t just me. Girls learn to apologize before they even learn to take up space. We apologize when someone bumps into us. We apologize for asking questions. We apologize for sharing opinions. We apologize because we’re too loud or too quiet. We apologize because we’re too big or too small. “Sorry!” slips out of our mouths like a reflex. We live in a constant battle of offering condolences. It’d be almost funny, really, if it weren’t so exhausting.
Women for centuries have been given a costume to wear no matter what time of year it is. Smile, but not too much. Be confident, but if you’re over confident, then you’re too intimidating. Be smart, but make sure you’re not making anyone else around you feel stupid. Be pretty, but don’t look like you’re trying too hard. Be independent, but do you have a boyfriend yet? These expectations manage to contradict themselves so relentlessly that one might even start to think that the goal is to make the majority of women fail.
Expectations rarely arrive as laws carved into marble. More often, they arrive as jokes, unwanted advice, uncomfortable questions, or just some good old fashioned backhanded compliments. While they accumulate slowly, eventually we begin to enforce these expectations within ourselves. We second-guess our outfits, we second-guess our hair, we rehearse conversations before having them, and ultimately apologize for opinions we have every right to express. In a way, we eventually become the architects of our own haunted houses. However, unlike the one I willingly entered, there is no guarantee that we can leave whenever we want, laughing it off.
The monsters stop just lurking behind curtains or in the dark, waiting to scare you. They become a voice in your head telling you that you are too quiet, too loud, not wearing enough makeup, or look too fat for this outfit. The scariest thing isn’t what other people think of us, but how easily we adopt what they think, and start to believe it.
When Halloween comes around, for just one night, we’re free. We can be witches, superheroes, villains, mermaids, or any overly exaggerated of ourselves we want. We can wear glitter, fake wings, wigs, or even enough eyeliner to qualify as a health concern. We can be dramatic, or mysterious, strange or intimidating. We can walk into a room looking nothing like ourselves, and instead of being asked to “tone it down,” we’re complimented or praised.
Imagine if we offered ourselves even a fraction of that Halloween freedom on an ordinary Wednesday. Feminism is not about telling a girl who she should become. It’s about letting her decide for herself. It’s about allowing women to be complicated, imperfect, loud, quite, ambitious, gentle, nurturing, non-maternal, angry, uncertain and everything in between. We are people, not costumes stitched togther from other people’s expectations.
So, the next time we catch ourselves apologizing for taking up space, let’s remember that the real monsters aren’t the ones lurking in the haunted houses, but the expectations that teach us to be afraid of ourselves. This Halloween, I challenge you to enjoy your costume, embrace the freedom, and be whoever you want to be, but also remember that we deserve that same freedom on the other 364 days of the year, too.