The Feelings of October: A Love Letter to the Best Month of the Year
All October posts are part of the Countdown to Halloween!
For eleven months of the year, I am slightly out of step with the world.
Not in a way that keeps me up at night. I've built a whole life around Halloween — the website, the magazine, the podcast, the community — and I wouldn't trade any of it.
But there's no getting around the fact that loving Halloween the way I love it, all year, every year, puts you a little bit sideways from the culture most of the time. The skeletons stay up in June. The playlist never really changes. You learn to live happily in the gap between who you are and what the calendar says is appropriate.
And then October arrives, and the gap closes.
That's the thing nobody quite prepares you for, the first time you realize you're a Halloween person for life.
It isn't just that you love the decorations or the candy or the costumes, though you do. It's that October is the one month where the world outside matches the world inside your head.
The stores look right. The light looks right. The air smells right. Everywhere you go, someone has put up a skeleton or a string of orange lights or a wreath that looks like it belongs on your front door, and for once you are not the person who is slightly too much.
You are exactly enough. You are, for 31 days, completely in step.
That feeling is hard to overstate if you've never experienced it from the other side.
🎃🖤✨
October is the world at its most itself, and it's also me at my most myself.
October also connects me to every version of myself that has ever loved this holiday.
I think about the kid I was, out trick-or-treating on Halloween night, feeling that particular electricity in the air that I still can't fully explain — this sense that anything is possible, that the world has cracked open just slightly and something magical has slipped through.
I feel it every year still. It hasn't gone anywhere. And there's something deeply reassuring about that, about the fact that the same night sky that filled me with wonder at eight years old still does it at however old I am now.
October is proof that some things don't have to change.
These days I hand out candy instead of collecting it. I turn my lights on and watch the kids come up the walk in their costumes, and I think about being on the other side of that door when I was their age, and how much it meant that someone had their lights on. I get to be part of that now. I get to be part of Halloween for another generation of kids who might grow up to be exactly like me — a little sideways from the world for eleven months, and completely at home in October.
The month itself is almost unbearably beautiful to me, in the specific way that things are beautiful when you've been waiting for them.
I notice the light more in October. There's a golden glow around sunset this time of year that makes the world look like a place I'd choose on purpose, not just a place I happen to live.
Living in Minneapolis has given me the full version of fall for the first time in my life — the rotting leaves that nobody has ever successfully put in a candle, the wood smoke drifting from fireplaces a few streets over, the sky on a clear Halloween night fading from deep purple into dark in a way that looks more intentional than any other night of the year. More nighty. I know that's a strange thing to say. It's just true.
October is the world at its most itself, and it's also me at my most myself. That overlap — the 31 days when those two things are finally the same — is what I spend the rest of the year looking forward to.
It's enough. It's always been enough.
