At this current moment of the year, I am trying to focus on a thousand things at once, as most college students are. The time of midterms, stress, exhaustion, and illness has kicked in or will for all college students now in mid-October. While this is ensuing, one topic has been perpetuating in my mind now more than ever: there are 13 nights before Halloween and I need to think of a costume.

This is a common issue I am sure everyone can relate to. Who hasn’t stressed about last minute costumes ideas for the night of terror and trick-or-treating? Especially for females, I believe this problem is more of an issue of what they end up choosing to wear. We are constantly judged by what we wear daily by our peers, and on the night of Halloween, this judgment intensifies. Wearing a simple cat or mouse costume is too “basic”; wearing a costume no one understands or knows about makes you look like an odd man out. Wearing too much for a costume can be too distracting for you to constantly check yourself; wearing too little for a costume can be too distracting for the others around you checking you out. There is a hard balance girls need to find with looking “cute” but not looking too “slutty”, and now in college, this is still an issue.

Discussing with my friends the various costume ideas out there, I think we can all say finding a right balance is tricky. This small but meticulous issue is still haunting me and I am still waiting for the right costume to scream and pop out of the shadows. Will I eventually come up with a costume? Yes. And I am sure I will love it at the end of the night. I hope everyone else reading this finds the costume that has a balance that best suits them for the spookiest night of the year.