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To the Protege: Love Your Costume!


Halloween comes and goes pretty quickly. You either dressed up, dressed someone else up, watched people who were all dressed up, or you didn’t bother with any of it for Halloween. In the last couple of years, I have made it my aim to figure out a costume, find fun friends, and enjoy one of the most playful "go back to childhood" party nights of the year.

As a kid, in a family of six kids, my mom and dad took the economical approach. We "made" our costumes. I turned milk cartons covered with tin foil into robot body parts, Mom's eyeliner and lipstick into vampire faces with blood, and many-o-bed sheets into mummy "Groovie Goolies" costumes. Armed with our fake blood and pillow case "Trick-or-Treat" bags, my sisters and I would head out just before sunset, amid the skittering leaves of that fateful autumn night, and run from door to door, as fast as we could, to bag as much high fructose "loot" as we could muster before the bewitching hour of curfew would toll.

A cultural game that starts as early as August and September for retailers, Halloween is BIG money, and big fun for young and old alike. Dress up, pretending, masquerading, costumes, and playing is all fun and games.

Well...until it’s not.

Most of us enjoy All Hallows’ Eve, for the cultural rituals that harken back not only to our sugar-enhanced childhoods, but which harken back through hundreds of years of honoring the Saints who have gone before us. Like the Mexican "Day of the Day" celebration, there is recognition on this hallow-day of persons or events to be remembered. “Halloween” translates to “hallow evening,” which relates to “holy days” or the word "holidays." There are origins in the church calendar that signified important feasts or “holy days.” These days celebrate REAL people, not skeletons, jack-o-lanterns, and scarecrows. There's a reality base for remembering the origins of this fall harvest festival. And that's fine.

But, when the parties are over and all the candy has been collected and sorted, most of us know...the masks come off. Masks are for pretend time. Masks were never meant to become identities. The real base of real persons must matter beyond the party.

Yet, we all know too well the fantasy of becoming Superman for a night or Wonder Woman for a day are just glancing moments of wistful daydreams that we could fly, that we could have the superpowers to vanquish evil plots or that, in the case of vampires and werewolves, we can be badder than we actually are. This is merely playtime.

Last year, I chose to take on the personality of a television character from a series I really enjoyed. I was Walter White from Breaking Bad! I had a black hat, dark beard, and sunglasses. I carried to my party a 2000 ml Erlenmeyer laboratory flask as a prop. All night long, fans of the TV show came up to me, exclaimed: "Wow! Heisenberg!! Love the costume, dude!" It was a great night for fun and games, and "breaking bad." But that was one night. (I don't really know much about chemistry, and don't think actual meth is a laughing matter...any more than the writers of the television show did. Vince Gillian, the creator, actually wanted to test the heavy of idea of what can be revealed in a man's character when he was pushed to the brink by his circumstances. It’s a question I think about a lot in my work of leadership education...thus my interest in personifying the professor-turned-noir social entrepreneur).

There are 364 more days in the year other than Halloween, and the fact is: some of us give off signals that we take masks very seriously, or carry daydreams a tad too far. What psychologist Carl Jung called "the shadow side," that unconscious part of us, has a way of playing its way into our very visible existence. And we can do a dance with ourselves, a dance with our shadow at times that can be sometimes entertaining (like Superheroes can be entertaining) or at times quite disturbing and even tragic (like vampires and werewolves can be disturbing and tragic).

Some roles were not written for us.

Although life circumstances can set us on paths and en-ROLE us into plots that are quite beneath or beyond our talents, we can take times like these, when people are taking off their costumes, taking off their masks, putting these things away in their closets and decide: masks are just for fun, not for living.

The problem with not owning the shadow, failing to shed the mask is captured in the words of one of my friends in a message she calls "Identity Theft:" If a mask is all you offer the world, "the mask gets the love."

The mask gets the love.

Hey listen, "love your costume!" You love it, and we will love it...while you are pretending. Enjoy the mask, for a night.

But, when the masquerade is over, give us a chance to love the person, to love you.

Is this—your mask—something you might want to talk to your mentor about?

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