you are what you hide

a love letter to halloween and workers with disabilities

Today is a special day to me.

As a former eight-year-old, halloween is my royal wedding. I want to know what everyone is wearing, where everyone is going, and what candy everyone is eating.

Conversations about halloween feel delicious to me, because they offer a lot of emotional data about a person. Do they stay in because they shudder at the thought of drawing attention to themselves? Do they go all out because it’s the one day they feel like they can let loose?

To me halloween isn’t a holiday, it’s a permission. For instance, it’s one day a year, where a man can wear a dress and walk into work, without any questions asked. A guy in heels will be embraced by his coworkers today, but if he kept the same shoes the next day, he would be stared at, mocked or maybe even reprimanded. The fact that so many grown men dress up as female characters on halloween, reveals a lot about what rules men in our culture, are longing to transgress. If boys and men had more latitude to take on feminine traits and fashion, would so many of them jump at the opportunity of getting to do it “as a joke” on halloween?

I find it curious that we’re encouraged to carry the spirit of christmas all through the year by giving and sharing our gifts with others, but not with halloween, despite the holiday being rooted in just as much religious symbolism. As an early pagan holiday, it was all about honoring and speaking to the dead, through various ceremonies and rituals. The 31st of october also lands right between the fall equinox and the winter solstice, which points to symbolic death, and new beginning. While it’s evolved into a much more light-hearted holiday about pumpkins and goblins, today might be a good day to ponder on the ghosts that live in your emotional closet. If they still haunt you, does it also feel hard to let them go? In order to celebrate, we often need to mourn first. It could be a habit, pattern or relationship that no longer serves you. By letting go and shedding those parts, what new opportunities would you be making space for? After all, the masks we sport on halloween aren’t just physical. A useful journal prompt for you today might be to think about what parts of you feel exposed, and what feelings it triggers to think about laying them bare.

Today is also the last day of national disability awareness employment month, a time where we pay tribute to the remarkable contributions of workers with disabilities. Less than 1 in 5 people with disabilities are currently employed and that means we simply don’t tap into their full potential. Ableism is estimated to cost global economies 3-7% of their GDP, which means that discriminating against disabled people costs us more than 1 trillion dollars in the US. While the focus is often on how expensive accommodations are, the price of ableism is much higher.

To celebrate one of my favorite months, I sat down with one of my my favorite friends, Pat. After contracting long covid and almost chocking to death in his apartment in new york, he was left unable to work his regular day-to-day corporate job due to painful lingering symptoms that left doctors befuddled. Dejected and bed-ridden, he grabbed a canvas and a brush, and started exploring. Art became his recovery, but it wasn’t just meaningful to him, it was resonating with thousands of others too. Soon, he was making enough money from selling his art that it became a real career path. Under his artist name, PJPIII, he’s created a community of loyal fans and followers dedicated to his messages of auspicious reclamation. Accepting, and even embracing his new physical limitations, has meant that he can surrender the idea of the future he had planned for, to embrace an imperfect present he could have never imagined.

PJPIII with one of his amazing creations (photo by jonathon ende)

Instead of denying, hiding or marginalizing people who are different, what if we could love them more fully? Maybe if we heard from more people like Pat, we’d be familiar with a different script about disability and chronic illness. Focussing on growth and metamorphosis doesn’t mean we obfuscate disappointment or loss, it means we honor those feelings more fully, and what new possibilities they can generate.

I hope you enjoy our conversation and enjoy Pat’s art, which you can check out here.