Halloween has never really been a great time of year for me. I never really understood the idea of paying a haunted house to scare you or scaring people for fun.

I think that as a kid it can be fun because you can dress up as anything you want, walk around the neighborhood with friends and family members, and they give you candy. But for me, as an adult, Halloween isn’t so fun anymore.

For starters, I have anxiety, so the thought of people doing anything they can to scare me just sounds totally dreadful. Mostly because I am not difficult to scare.

Second of all, I have a severe phobia of clowns and mimes. Typically, there’s at least one of either one at every Halloween function or outing, so its impossible for me to enjoy. No matter how much I tell myself that it isn’t real and that it’s just a regular person dressed up, I can’t control my mind from panicking.

Third of all, this day in age, haunted houses make me nervous because it seems like the perfect place for someone to go to actually hurt people. What if one of these haunted houses one night isn’t fake. Who’s to say that some disturbed individual or group of people aren’t dressing up for the haunted house and actually hurting people. It would be so hard to tell, because people are already screaming and running around, it would be hard to tell if it really was happening for real.

In my mind, there are too many reasons not to go to haunted houses.

So this time of year, I tend to avoid television channels that feature Halloween and horror movies, and I don’t really go to Halloween parties or events incase of the clowns. Right now, I’m just ready for November.