Facing the Maskless Life

This past Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control announced, unexpectedly, that fully-vaccinated individuals could intermix freely without a mask without presenting a hazard to themselves of the community. By coincidence, that very morning Lauren and I had crossed our two-week waiting period and had crossed into the realm of fully-vaccinated status. To put things mildly, it was a time for jubilation.

For those of us who survived the long plague year in the city hardest-hit by the virus, it was a strange sort of announcement. Could we actually go back out, without our hot breaths being re-routed back up our nostrils? That first afternoon that we dared it. We left the apartment and took Byron to the 87^th street dog run. The air was clear and warm. It smelled incredible. Pollen and warm sunshine mixed in a delightful way reminding us of what we had lived without for so long: the dust of the dog park, the smell of a stranger dog greeting me, the smell of freshly-mown grass. The smells of New York’s electric and vibrant summer were returned to us after a year-long absence.

At the run, many who had not yet reached full vaccination or were still wary were still masked. After the initial elation and a fun playtime in the run, we headed back to our building, masked up (per building rules), and came back home. That evening we ate out, maskless, indoors, and it was again a novelty. But over the next several hours Lauren and I found ourselves wearing masks again, perhaps out of custom, and perhaps out of laziness as we drifted in and out of establishments requiring their usage. Their wear had become habit and I was surprised to find that I couldn’t just stop.

Noticing this phenomenon, and reading others’ experience of it, suggested that there might be two groups for whom giving up mask wearing might be a little less attractive to cease doing:

those whose appearance is outside the mean and occasions unsought scrutiny
the pandemic “shell-shocked” for whom the mask is a psychological support in uncertain times

Anonymity

When I started wearing the mask, my thought was:

Hey, I’m doing this damned uncomfortable thing because I don’t want your death on my hands.

But it’s certainly possible to see where some other might have felt a notable decrease in anxiety from “the old normal.”

Having seen my colleague be told to “smile more” or watched my wife get cat-called on the corner the moment I took three steps away from her, I could see how the mask was a tool for personal sovereignty and defense communicating: “I’m not here for your consideration.” As quoted in The Guardian, Hartley Miller of San Francisco said:

…I’m sick of being perceived.

It put me in mind of the character Joelle from Infinite Jest who wears a veil as part of her membership in a society for the freakishly mutilated after having been widely regarded by many as being cripplingly beautiful before the accident that marred her. That she regards freakish beauty or freakish dismemberment as, shrug about the same, is telling.

Sick of being perceived.

Trauma

But there’s another motivation, and Lauren captured it succinctly after hearing about a woman who got COVID three days after her grandmother got it. The grandmother was quarantined, died alone, and her belongings were left in “you’ve been fired” brief-boxes for sake of preventing contaminating spread. Also in the brief box? The ashes of her grandfather. Lauren remarked that all of us who survived the close proximity to the endless wail of sirens hauling out the dead are a cohort of PTSD walking wounded.

Said Emma Green in The Atlantic, echoing Lauren:

…[we]’re working through the trauma of the past year, in which the brokenness of America’s medical system was so evident.

Trauma, exactly.

In 2020 year, when the Trump administration so thoroughly bungled their response, the mask was the one, simple, affordable, accessible thing that we like those walking around Sarajevo in 1990 or Baghdad in 2002 or Berlin in 1943 could do to feel some autonomy and control in a world rife with dangers that we knew our leaders were not helping us avoid.

Even if masks’ efficacy had been far lower than it actually was, it was a source of comfort to imagine that they created an odds-mutating bubble when put on at a time when leaders were talking about the cost/benefit of lives in exchange for economic energy (Hi, Dan Patrick, Lt. Governor (R) of Texas).

In the present, to be told that those faithful cloths and our practices associated with them are, at a stroke, over is something that’s hard to let go of. As I’ve heard from many an ex-smoker, it’s not the smoking per se, it’s all the empty minutes where once there was ritual and now there isn’t. Grace and compassion for one another is warranted. To berate the shell-shocked for not-so-easily giving up their masks is unnecessary and unkind on par with Patton’s slapping of soldiers with crippling PTSD.

We, the mask-wearing, are facing the realization that one thing we did that felt like control in this world is gone. In its place, there’s only the Buddhic certainty that this life is short, and that we dwell within a vale of sorrows, capricious, strange, and ultimately, always-fatal.