‘Tis the season of the witch

October’s always been Halloween month.

And that can mean scary skeleton animatronics hanging on the roof of your local SoLow store (read interchangeably with Spirit Halloween or any cheap costume store), theme parks that get a change of dressing at the evening hour with actors that fill the grounds pretending to be everything you were scared of as a child (think monsters, zombies, never-really dying pirates with one eye and a hook hand, or just really bad grades), and weirdly cozy and not so scary books like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

And for most of my life growing up, I thought it just meant dressing up with some element of slutty involved: think low self-worth nurse with an honours degree, her uniform skirt is not-too-short high school girl, or tits-out witch with the sharpest nails and mind but you never looked past the tits.

And I indulged this with warm cups of hot chocolate, pretending to like blood and gore while being permanently scarred by an untimely viewing of The Exorcist when I was six, Hokus Pokus and Ghostbusters reruns and a once quite humorous “Diwalloween”.

But what if we were always meant to go further in, start seeing how the potions are made, look to our moms and grandmas for every thing they had to go through to all universally get the personality characteristic of being a “strong, sacrificial woman”, who crawled and walked with weights on their back so we truly could run, and start paying attention to our inner glass ball of visions that have always been telling us what we want all along.

We give so much power to everyone around us all the time.

I see it in the news, I see it in my feed, I see it in the friends that ask me to text them when I get home and the ones that hug me the tightest each time I say goodbye. I see it in the checklist we grew up with that we can never forget:

Where are you going?

With who?

What are you wearing?

When are you coming back?

How are you going there?

Each time, we run it through our heads to build a rubric to figure out if our adventure was safe enough to venture on and if we’d come back home the way we’d left it.

I see it in all the women that are so full of rage and yet learn to tenderly hold it within them like the stuffed toy their teen boyfriends once gifted them. I see it in the way that we’re looked at, and yet never truly seen. I see it in the way our hemlines define our morals and bras strap down the screams in our lungs. I see it in all of us as we all have some story to tell of how we were too young, too scared, too friendly, too naive, and how they probably didn’t mean to do it? They must have just brushed past, they were standing too close and I shouldn’t have bent over the table at the stall to get a closer look at the flap cover at a book fair with my back to the crowd.

And I see it in all the women in my life that hold me close, build me up, are truly happy for all the happier things that manifest in my life and are never scared to share their precious power with each other.

Witches, I urge you to treat October as the month to be whimsical: to see a spiral staircase in an old library and think of all the old books filled with rules on how to be a good girl that you could read and then tear apart. To sing with your heart out to the silliest songs as you change the light bulb in your hallway or drive to your big girl office job to tell Dan from work to shut up in the most polite way. To wear your stockings and run ladders through them and continue wearing them anyway. To howl with your girls like a werewolf on a full moon night out. To get the pumpkin spice and maple lattes, marvel at the same red leaves you see every year, and look at how incredible you’ve been with every fucked up thing in your life: you’ve needed this whimsy and you’ve had it within you guiding you this whole time.