With Jason Mott, National Book Award winner, fall 2022
It took me a nanosecond to embrace wearing a mask when the pandemic hit. Aside from deterring all airborne infections and reducing the risk to others, it checked these boxes:
• No one sees my “phony smile”
• No one sees me talking to myself
• No one sees my Resting Bitch Face
Nor did I have to see any of these on others if they were wearing a mask. Why would anyone have a problem with them? As we know, many did and could not wait to stop wearing theirs.
My husband and I were holdouts when mask mandates started lifting in the spring of 2022. I’d return from errands and cry: “People act like Covid is over! No masks! What’s wrong with them?”
Winter 2022, it hit us: a bad cold with no energy for two weeks. Mask-less friends asked, “Why do you keep wearing one if you still got Covid?”
In addition to ticking off the above list, there are too many unknowns, and who wants to be sick at all? My husband had it a second time with completely different symptoms. Some Covid survivors suffer long-term effects like vertigo and worse. One described their Covid-induced tinnitus as “a boiling tea kettle whistle screaming in my ear all the time.” It had been going on for months.
Also, I lost one of my oldest friends to Covid. He had taken all precautions and was in good health. It’s hard to shake the deafening silence of someone you love now gone from your life forever.
One positive thing about the pandemic is that, despite loved ones dying and it sharply dividing people over vaxxing and masking, it did bring us together. We all had to deal with it. We all have our Covid stories now.
It took a trip abroad in June 2023 to start us loosening up about masking. Wearing one outside in beautiful weather was too annoying. We’d had a needle stuck in our arm five (or was it six?) times since Covid vaccines began. We had to stop being so fearful. If we did get it again, we hoped it would not be serious. But we still hear of friends coming down with it. It’s not over.
I keep my N95 on a silver chain around my neck. If I find myself in a tight space with other people (like an elevator), or I’m near someone coughing or sneezing, or I’m going into a medical facility or drug store with a higher number of sick people, I put it on.
Thankfully, we’ve come to a place where you can wear a mask and not owe an explanation to anyone. I hope this lasts. I want to wear a mask—and my RBF—for the rest of my life.
Fence covered in jasmine, Madrid, Spain, 2023