Feeling Frustrated About Adulthood and The Loss of Joy Over Halloween

Halloween will be next week. I used to be excited about it, but for the past few years, I’ve been secretly been feeling really unexcited about it. It seems like every year, Halloween gets scarier and scarier. Haunted houses are getting more and more intense. Halloween costumes and decorations are looking more and more frightening. For someone who love to be scared on Halloween, this is great. As for me, I don’t like to get scared. At all. So, Halloween has become one of the holidays I don’t like no where near as much as I used to.

And that makes me sad.

Halloween used to be fun for me. Sure, there were plenty of scary things I hated so much. I also felt really embarrassed by how scary I felt. Still, I found ways to enjoy the holiday and celebrate it. This year, it feels like something has changed inside me. Now Halloween doesn’t look as exciting or happy as it used to be.

If someone wants to go into a deep discussion about why I’m not longer excited about it, I can point to several triggers. One of them is I live in a rural area. I don’t live in an area (Or at least my house isn’t located really close to) where children live. This means trick or treaters can’t visit my house. When I was a girl, I loved to go trick or treating. Today, one of the highlights of Halloween is trick or treating! I love giving out candy to the children that visit! Sadly, they don’t visit my house.

There are many others, but I need to face it: my loss of joy for Halloween has been a long time coming. Too many things happen to me around this time of the year. It doesn’t help that this year’s October and fall season has been harder on me mentally and emotionally than in previous years.

So, I’m feeling pretty down about Halloween this year. Also, the priorities I have now as an adult have made me shift my attention away from celebrating Halloween, or any other holiday for that matter. I needed to focus my energy on them. Not decorating and attending holiday oriented celebrations.

This year’s Halloween won’t be as exciting as I want it to be. I also won’t be able to celebrate it the way I want to. (Especially when it comes to trick or treating visitors!) Instead, I’m going to focus on celebrating Halloween by myself in a manageable way. One of those ways is to watch children’s Halloween movies, such as It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown! or the Halloweentown movies. I also have plans to knit myself a new scarf while watching these movies. Or maybe I will drag out my iPad and start drawing again? I’ll just need to wait and see what I feel like doing at that time.

Well, that’s all for now! Thank you for reading!