It is a week before Halloween as I’m writing this. I have two Halloween parties on my calendar (on separate days) and am struggling to come up with a costume idea. I have my old fallback, which I haven’t worn since 2019, but it’s incredibly warm and not super great if I’m going to be indoors for the whole party since it involves wearing my heavy winter jacket. The last couple years, I’ve gotten by with some simple things, but they all took a little bit of planning to execute and I barely have enough executive function left at the end of my work days to keep up with my blog posts. I’m not going to spend any of that on figuring out a costume that I will inevitably need to order online after doing some lengthy shopping around since finding anything for a person built like me (tall, heavy, barrel-chested, and broad-shouldered) is incredibly rare in the first place. I mean, I can barely find socks in stock that fit me outside of the incredibly basic plain white type. There’s no way I can buy any ready-made put-on-a-single-thing type costume and expect even the largest size to fit comfortably even if it is advertised as fitting someone with my general proportions. Well, at least the ones listed since few of those kinds of costumes include shoulder/chest measurements in their sizing charts, which is usually where things fall apart for me. So buying anything easy is out and most of the stuff I’ve accumulated over the years that I could slap together into some kind of closet costume just doesn’t fit anymore: a problem I encountered and partially solved last year, except that none of that clothing is good for anything other than actual casual wear. All the random odds and ends one accumulates through the years that can sometimes be compiled into some kind of rather mundane costume don’t fit my shoulders anymore and I don’t really feel like going as “the hulk after he has shrunk back to normal size.”

My aforementioned old fallback is a costume from the Pokémon series. Thanks to my accumulation of odds and ends, I’ve got all the clothes I’d need to dress up as a Hiker Pokémon trainer from Generation IV. I’ve got the little red scarf (well, it’s a towel on the actual hiker, but my scarf is a perfect visual match), the jacket, the hat, the shorts, the shoes, and ever the framed backpack. I’ve also got plenty of various Pokémon toys I could use to make it clear what I’m going for, even if I’ve gotten rid of Pokémon Go and the thematic battle team I’d put together for the costume back in 2019. I mean, no one ever wanted to battle me while I had the costume on since most people also needed to be told what the costume was (not a lot of people I’ve gone to Halloween parties with have played Pokémon as thoroughly as I have), but I was absolutely prepared to battle anyone who got the costume. I was also sweating like crazy under the heavy coat and spent as much time outside as possible. This year suggests some fairly chilly temperatures–though nothing quite like the snow we had last year–so it is quite possible that I’ll be able to wear this costume comfortably, but it’s also still possible that the warm weather we’re expecting on the 29th (as of writing this, anyway) will stick around and give us a rather more temperate Halloween than I’d be able to stand wearing what amounts to my heavy winter outfit [which is exactly what has happened].

Other options that I have on hand include, in order of most to least recent following that Hiker costumer (I did not go to a Halloween party in 2020, for obvious reasons) is a “sorcerer” robe off amazon with a black morph suit underneath it that I called “The Looming Specter of Death;” a cut-out gym shirt, gym shorts, and sweatband that I wore over a Yoshi onesie that I called “Gym Broshi,” and then the aforementioned Yoshi onesie. All of which fit, but just barely. They’re all difficult to get into and out of, on account of them only barely fitting. I’d like to avoid all of them since at least the Hiker Pokémon Trainer costume hasn’t been worn as such in five years. No one will probably remember it. I won’t feel as weird about repeating it as I’d feel about repeating the other ones, but I will still feel weird about it. Less so than I otherwise might since I last wore it in the pre-pandemic era and that was a lifetime ago. It barely counts as being “recent” given just how much has happened since then. I’ll probably need to check my clothes to make sure all the pieces are still in some kind of wearable condition (and that I still have the right color of dark brown pants), but I should be able to assemble something at least very close to it no matter what. Why is it such a big deal to avoid repeating a costume when I, personally, who has a very good visual memory, can’t remember what pretty much anyone else wore last year, much less any year prior? I don’t know and I should probably talk to my therapist about why this imagined social pressure to do something “new” is outweighing my very real need to keep things simple and low-energy this year.

I mean, why am I even going at all? I don’t think any of the people I’ll be seeing have been particularly Covid-conscious. I’m throwing aside my normal practice of avoiding social gatherings for a once-yearly event on a weekend when I have a VERY good reason to stay at home (Dragon Age: The Veilguard released today). Why throw away so much caution and potentially expose myself to the unfiltered breath of a bunch of people who could just as easily have some other symptom-less illness as they could have Covid? I don’t even drink and Halloween parties are almost exclusively about drinking when you go to one of the child-free adult parties. Why subject myself to all this stress and all the risk I constantly avoid the rest of the year? The easy answer is that I’m lonely and would like to socialize in a physical place with people who aren’t my coworkers. I haven’t seen most of my friends (and the expanded parts of one of these two groups that I’m just friendly with) in months, thanks to my sleep problems and the slow breakdown of our old reasons for gathering, and I would like to be in a place where I can make physical contact with people I care about since it has been so long and that’s really not healthy for me. Thus the decision to attend (with appropriate risk mitigations) and the heavy weight of my question about what to wear. It’s easy to brush that stuff aside if you don’t really care about what you’re doing, but this is my first group in-person thing that isn’t work since my vacation in June. It’s difficult to just feel normal things about all this, so I’ll set aside all those complex feelings I don’t really have answers for and agonize about what to wear instead.