🎭 I'm Not Wearing A Mask This Halloween

I used to all year round...

Jen Vermet

Oct 31, 2023

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Pole dancing and Kamchatka pulls.

In 2015, I dressed up as a unicorn for Halloween as one of my many costumes that week. I loved Halloween because I didn’t love being myself. I knew other characters better than I knew myself.

The last week of October was my favorite time because I escaped reality by wearing a mask with costumes, pretending to be someone I was not. I even started a collection with a huge costume box for Rosie the Riveter, Rex Kwondo from Napoleon Dynamite, and a lacrosse player (aka a lax bro). It was the socially acceptable time to be someone else. And since I never spent time getting to know myself, I loved this chance.

I was a busy bee. Or, as I might call myself today, a human doing rather than a human being. I was working hard, barely getting by in my accounting classes, and playing harder, going from party to party after sorority meetings and club swim team practices. Being a nobody most of high school, I loved how being in a prestigious business school made me feel like somebody. I tried to be liked and bought my friendships, hoping for my lifelong sisters after rushing my sorority that trained me to blend in.

From the outside, everything looked okay, but on the inside, no one knew.

19-year-old Jen was creative enough to go to the craft store and carve out a unicorn horn of styrofoam with a Cutco steak knife and glue it onto a headband. She loved any chance to wear vibrant colors, so it was a great excuse to wear this rainbow tutu to feel like a dancer again, even though she was always a back-row ballerina. She loved how practical Converse shoes were to clean later.

That Halloween night in 2015, it rained, but that didn’t stop any of the fun. I danced the night away to songs like Uptown Funk that made me lose my voice under disco lights. Out until 2 AM, I inhaled an Italian nightclub from Jimmy Johns on my walk home down Slant Walk across campus to Hamilton Hall.

I was a teenager on the cusp of being a twentysomething, appearing giddy and joyous. But I also shotgunned a bunch of Natty lights and was on a grand adventure of attending as many fraternity parties as possible to be a part of something bigger than myself.

I was deeply afraid of loneliness. The only times I was ever alone was usually on the third floor of King Library. Hunched over debits and credits of an accounting spreadsheet in my six-pound textbook, I’d sip my white can of Monster and forget about the cup of what used to be iced espresso shots with cinnamon sprinkled on top. Many Redhawk alums I befriended at the bar during homecoming told me these years were their peak and the best days of their life. This scared me.

Locked into auto-pilot, I cruised down a default path, going through the motions of college life with summer internships and studying abroad, bringing glimmers of adulting in the real world. Except that I was far from being an adult. Who was that person I spent all that time with?

I didn’t love myself because I didn’t make the time to understand myself. It wasn’t until my second-semester senior year that I had a massive wake-up call…

⏰ My wake-up call

In the Spring of 2018, I signed up for an 8:30 AM Monday, Wednesday, and Friday business course. I didn’t need it to graduate, but I was curious. Entrepreneurship 252 was supposed to be about innovation but was masked; it was actually a personal development course.

On day one, I flunked the surprise test because I wrote the first right answer that came to mind instead of thinking about the second right answer. Professor Friedman was one-of-a-kind who praised iteration and the showing of work from the creative process. I created this portfolio to turn in for my final as a compilation of resonant artifacts, assignments, and thoughts about my identity. I ended up failing the final and bringing my grade point average down, but that was okay.

Entrepreneurship 252 shook me awake to understand myself better. This class gave me questions to start pondering for the rest of my life, like “What are my natural strengths?” and “What do I want my obituary to read?” I didn’t know how to answer these questions, but it planted the seed for me to start looking inward.

Before this, I tried my best to ignore learning any more knowledge of myself that would make me different from the crowd. I didn't ever sit with my feelings or give myself the chance to realize that I can’t just rub dirt into everything. I am a sensitive person who cries to the movie Marley & Me every single time and feels things deeply if I allow myself to.

💡 How I got to know myself better

After graduating college, I didn’t have professors showing me the ropes of what to learn next. I looked to the Internet to continue to seek more shepherds. My curiosity led the way. I cold-emailed Georgetown Professor Eric Koester to take his book writing class to attempt to fulfill my dream of publishing a book. I flew to New York City to meet the author Jesse Itzler after he showed me how to build my own Life Resume. I even returned to the basics. After discovering I had dyslexia, I swallowed my pride and sat in the room next to six-year-olds learning phonics to read aloud for an hour to my reading coach each week to gain confidence in my comprehension. I became obsessed with learning again.

Starting to discover more about myself paved the way for a journey with a lot more introspection, a lot more understanding, and a lot more self-love. Ever since, I have been on a journey with myself to continue to get to know how I live alongside my emotions in this one wild and precious life we live in.

I’ve journaled daily for five years and don’t run away from my feelings. I see now that understanding how I feel is not something to be ashamed of but an invitation to explore and get curious. I tell romantic crushes when I’m crushing. I don’t drink alcohol when I’m sad. I don’t scroll social media when I want to numb.

I celebrate who 19-year-old Jen used to be. These were all pieces of the journey that I used to be embarrassed about, but they are what created experiences that made me who I am today. I give my past self a much-needed hug.

I used to try hard to blend in and drown my sorrows with pulls of Kamchatka and letting loose on the pole. I loved Halloween because I got to wear a mask to pretend to be okay. I faked the happy and hid the sad. But now, I am willing to find out whatever it takes to truly feel and take off the mask.

I’ve been feeling throughout my life on the surface, but I am now holding space to have a new relationship with these feelings. I want to know who I am when I experience them.

I used to wear costumes all year round, but when I dressed up as a jellyfish this Halloween, I knew exactly who the underlying person was.

I am just wearing a cute glowing costume. I am not masking myself anymore

I appreciate you reading letter 182!

If ideas resonate, I’d love you to press the heart button, leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetjl@gmail.com. If you forget who I am, I welcome you to my online home.

Never stop learning 😁

Mahalo 🌺

Jen

PS - in case you missed last week, I wrote 🍭 Stop Yucking Your Yum

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