Please welcome today’s guest writer, Ethan Meyers. Ethan graduated from Calvin in 2025 with a degree in international relations.
Our theme for the month of October is “childhood fears.”
I stared at this page when it was blank for quite a while, and I’ll come right out and say it: I don’t think I had any real childhood fears. Sure, I was afraid of the dark, the leopard seal from Happy Feet, and some of Frank Herbert’s descriptions in Dune. Nothing worth writing about for publication on Halloween, probably the most explicitly fear-focused day of the year.
I’m still afraid of spiders (it’s the way they move…) so that doesn’t count as a childhood fear. Lots of my other fears have a distinctly adult quality: What if I look back at thirty and discover I’ve wasted a year, or two, or ten? How long can I go before I need a “real” job, and what if I don’t find one? What’ll life look like when my friends with clear-cut paths to success have gotten degrees, gotten married, gotten insurance?
Woah there, Ethan. A couple hundred words isn’t a crystal ball, so now’s not the time to try and look too far ahead. Actually, amidst all the cutesy ghosts and cheesy zombies out and about today, there’s an interesting fear lurking. Not a childhood fear per se, but a fear about childhood.
Halloween is probably America’s most kid-centric holiday. Most people’s workaround for being too old to trick-or-treat, it seems, is to chaperone their own kids’ route through the neighborhood. That way, people nod approvingly at your parenting even if you nick a Rolo or two from the bucket as you go door-to-door. What about those of us who are in between trick-or-treating ourselves and supervising someone else?
Yeah, yeah, I know us twenty-somethings can participate in Halloween however we like. As much as I’d like you to believe otherwise, I’m not the mix of whimsical and self-assured it takes to be part of a gender-bent vampire-hunting group costume outing to a hip karaoke bar. My sense of civic duty will be strong enough to have me sit on the porch for an hour or two, doing my bit to make sure the littles go home all sugared up.
Sooner than I probably should, though, I’ll be tempted to go inside, turn off the lights, and curl up with a book. Does that make me whatever the pumpkin-spice equivalent of a Grinch is? It’s a scary thought.
I never want to outgrow silliness, whimsy, and curiosity. As a teen, I used to pointedly tell people “If I grow up” rather than “When” each time I talked about future plans. Staying young, attitude-wise, when I’m seventy or eighty is a deep aspiration of mine. With that goal in mind, the way my feelings about Halloween are changing is frightening indeed.
Luckily for me, it’s not too late. I have some candy to pass out, and I don’t need a clever costume to be a good sport for this particular year. The weather looks okay, and I know that once I’m out in the fresh air, I’ll remember the thrill of planning my own perfect trick-or-treating route not so many Octobers ago. As with all things we’re starting to forget, maybe now that I’m older, being a kid is going to take some practice. One thing’s for sure: I won’t find out if I keep the porch lights off.
Ethan Meyers graduated from Calvin in 2025 with a degree in international relations. He also studied French and economics. For a year after Calvin, Ethan lived in Washington, DC, where he was at least the third Calvin alum to work for Sojourners magazine. Against his better judgement, he now cobbles together a living writing freelance from East Lansing, Michigan, while looking for whatever more advisable path may lead to the future.
