This weekend is a time when we get to play pretend. We get to use our imaginations, we get to be creative, we get to dress up. Well some of us can use our imaginations, in all of my years of dressing up for Halloween, be them as a child or an adult, I can think of only one time when I did not dress up as a baseball player. Part of it was my love of the game, but mostly to be honest it was the ease of the costume that made it most appealing. I don’t have to buy anything, don’t have to spend time on makeup….maybe a little eye black if it was a year I was feeling particularly ambitious. Nice and easy, but I always enjoyed it.
My kids are the opposite. They are very fortunate to have an aunt who is a talented seamstress and they utilize that relationship to its fullest. It is fun to hear them planning their costumes in August, because they know that they need to give her time to make them. And make them she does, we are talking papier-mâché heads when one of them was Shrek, to leather wristbands and accents when they were Thor. There have been multiple capes, which get put in the dress up box afterwards and are used multiple times throughout the next year.
Because of the rules for school costumes one thing that doesn’t get done very often in our family, which is actually a Halloween staple for so many, is masks. The Halloween mask is a far reaching as someone’s imagination. There are so many, you can transform your self into basically whatever or who ever you want, and with the right mask no one can tell who you actually are.
We have been wearing masks of a different sort for some time now, not to scare each other but to protect each other. This has also got me to thinking what other masks do we wear. What do we put on, in our personalities, in our demeanour to hide who we really are or what is really going on underneath?
Some wear the mask of addiction, putting on a clean face to those around when really they are fighting demons inside of themselves. Some wear the mask of abuse. Both victim and abuser can wear these masks, hiding what is really going on in their lives and in their relationships. Some wear a mask to hide who they really are, hiding their gender identity, their sexual orientation behind what is thought to be normal for society.
All of these masks are truly scary as they don’t just hid but they hurt as well. We should live in a society where people feel safe talking about their addictions without the fear of judgement. We should live in a society where people who live in abusive relationships should be able find help without the fear of denial or retaliation. We should live in a society where people who live hiding their true identities should not have to, plain and simple. We all should feel able to be our true selves.
There are many masks in this world, some we wear only once a year, and some that people feel they need to wear each and every day to hide parts of themselves. Halloween masks are supposed to be funny, playful, maybe a little scary, but they aren’t supposed to hurt us or others. They give us a break from reality but they are supposed to come off so we can be our true selves once again.
Let us end the stigma around addiction, let us be truly supportive of people who are suffering from abuse, let us accept people for who they are. Let us get to a place where we don’t wear masks to hide part of ourselves, we just wear them to get candy.
By Mark Laird, DM Drayton United Church