As Halloween approaches, students in Groningen are once again slipping into their spooky disguises—from zombies who look suspiciously like they are heading to early classes, to sexy bunnies creatively covered in fake blood.
In my search for costume inspiration, I asked people about their real fears. After weaving through mentions of spiders, never-ending deadlines, and even dead celebrities, one answer kept surfacing. This year I will have the scariest costume of them all: ‘Disappointment’.
The fear of disappointment comes in various forms, and it is hardly ever easy to recognise it immediately. Every time I asked about fears, it took a few rounds of conversation to peel back the layers and find disappointment lurking underneath all these other facades, such as incorrect life choices, academic failure, or a broken heart.
One friend, an econometrics student, confidently claimed he wasn’t really afraid of anything; his ‘statistical foresight’ supposedly eliminated most uncertainties. But with a few more sips of courage potion, it turned out his math didn’t fully protect him from fear after all.
The deeper we went, the more he started to describe fears that he couldn’t calculate—relationships, future regrets, and, finally, death itself. It was almost like his assurance in his bright future was a well-practiced strategy he had on hand to keep any thoughts of disappointment at bay.
Disappointment lingers in our minds, ready to catch us off guard when we feel like we are on the verge of something important
Another friend of mine confided her fear about life after university. She worried she would find herself socially isolated, as if all her social skills would vanish together with her diploma. Here, too, was that familiar dread of not measuring up, of somehow ending up as a letdown.
We live in this strange purgatory where every choice feels like a prelude to something enormous and undefined. Yet, that ‘something’ remains a collection of unknowns, goals that somehow we are all supposed to nail. And so disappointment becomes our generational ghost, haunting us in the spaces where our ambitions live.
Whether it is letting others down or—perhaps worse—letting ourselves down, disappointment lingers in our minds, just out of view, ready to catch us off guard when we feel like we are on the verge of something important.
Maybe this Halloween, instead of the predictable zombie get-up or more animal outfits, we should try out a costume that reflects something truly terrifying: pre-emptive fear that keeps us from fully investing in our future hopes and dreams.
Perhaps, if we truly take the mask off to look into the eyes of our own very feared disappointments, we could understand our true values and desires. And who knows? Maybe in admitting it, we might even scare ourselves into taking a step we never thought possible before.
LIZA KOLOMIIETS