Masks and Mortality: What Halloween Teaches Us
🌑 The Shadows We Avoid All Year
Halloween is my favorite holiday. What’s not to love? We get to dress up as different characters (masks included), there are parties, the weather cools, the air smells like fall, candy is everywhere—and, maybe best of all, we’re invited to face the shadows. The things we avoid the rest of the year—fear, darkness, and death—can now be experienced and even enjoyed.
Most of the time, we try not to think about our own mortality. It’s something we push aside for a thousand reasons. But when Halloween comes around, even if we don’t talk about death directly, it shows up in symbols: ghosts, skeletons, graveyards, bugs, and monsters. For one night, we embrace the darkness—the very things we usually avoid—including the masks we wear every day.
🎭 The Masks We Wear to Survive
On Halloween, we put on costumes: monsters, ghouls, witches. But the rest of the year, we wear other kinds of masks: the caretaker, the achiever, the agreeable one. Sometimes we’ve worn these masks so long they feel like part of who we are. They are who we are. We first put them on for good reasons—fear of rejection, fear of loss, fear of failure. They were survival strategies that once kept us safe. But they don’t protect us forever.
When life changes and we cling to an old mask we no longer need, it’s like walking around in a Halloween costume without realizing it. We think it’s invisible, but it shapes the rooms we’re allowed into, the way people treat us—and the way we treat ourselves. And yet we do this all the time with the identities we give ourselves. We are terrified of losing the mask that carried us this far—no matter how much it has cost us.
☠️ The Many Deaths We Live
Our final physical death isn’t the only death we experience in life. In fact, there are small deaths we live through again and again—the end of a relationship, the loss of an identity, the shedding of old ways of being. Each asks us to face impermanence, to release the mask we thought we couldn’t live without. And often, we go through them clawing at the edges, resisting every inch.
We cling to our masks—the agreeable caretaker, the overachiever, the one who never needs help—because taking them off feels too much like dying. Yet paradoxically, whenever we loosen their grip, we glimpse freedom: the freedom of belonging to ourselves rather than to the roles we perform. And sometimes, that freedom feels scarier than the darkest parts of Halloween.
Masks do protect us from external elements. But they also protect us from joy, authenticity, and connection. They keep out rejection, but they also keep out intimacy. And so, even when the mask has become suffering—loneliness, sadness, disconnection—we keep wearing it, guarding the status quo.
Halloween and death together remind us: there are many deaths besides the final one. The death of roles. The death of identities. The death of certainty, of control, of old versions of ourselves. Naming these deaths matters. Honoring them matters. They served us, and they got us here—and that is no small thing. But when the moment comes, we’re allowed to release them.
Change can feel like dying—it’s scary, overwhelming, and often out of our control. It’s okay to name this. It’s okay to feel this. It’s okay to admit the fear and grief. It’s okay to honor the loss. And what a loss it can be…
🦋 The Freedom of Living Unmasked
Halloween, in its strange wisdom, gives us both metaphors at once: the mask and the skeleton, performance and impermanence. It reminds us that identity is fluid, endings are inevitable, and the bravest thing we can do may be to laugh with our fear and live unmasked.
On Halloween, we wear our costumes, we play, we flirt with fear. And then the next day, we take them off. What would it look like to allow ourselves that kind of honesty on the other 364 days of the year?
Kierkegaard once said there is a “dizziness in freedom.” That dizziness is proof we are alive. We don’t have to drop every mask at once—but we can set one down and see what life feels like without it.
✨ Closing Reflection
What mask am I willing to set down, even briefly?
What small death am I resisting, and what might grow in its place if I choose to let it go?
Where could I let impermanence guide me toward freedom instead of fear?
May this season remind you of life’s impermanence and the beauty of the many deaths we live before our final one. May it remind you that we can choose our masks—and that we are free to put them down when they no longer serve us.
With compassion and curiosity,
Sarah Mugford, LPCC