Ending the Mask Mandates, and the Struggles We’re Not Talking About

A few days ago, the CDC announced that Americans who have received a full dose of the vaccine for COVID-19 (either two doses of Modern or Pfizer, or one dose of J&J) no longer need to mask up in most circumstances. It’s supposed to be an incentive; go get the vaccine and then you don’t have to wear a mask anymore! But if I’ve learned anything in this past year, it’s that people are willing to lie if they think they can protect their own personal comfort by doing so.

I’m not going to talk about that right now, though. That’s a whole different story.

What I am going to talk about is the sudden influx of a particular attitude. It’s worst on social media, but I’ve had several conversations face-to-face about it too. People have taken it upon themselves to make sure everyone knows that we’re “going to have to adjust” to seeing unmasked people walking around in public.

Is it a reasonable thing to say? Yeah, sure, I guess. Going forward, we’re going to be seeing a lot more of people’s faces and it’s going to be weird. There’s going to be an adjustment period.

But alongside making sure everyone knows we’re “going to have to adjust,” there’s this toxic idea that we need to learn to adjust now.

I keep seeing Facebook posts about this adjustment we must all go through right now. A friend of my late father-in-law even went as far as saying that if you can’t handle being near unmasked people, then just don’t interact with them. She went on to say that we have to control our own reactions and that learning to adjust is a “life skill” that everyone should have, implying that if you cannot simply adjust, there’s something wrong with you. She concluded her post with “either learn to adjust or just be miserable”.

Here’s the thing. For the past year and a half, essential employees have been going through a particular trauma that no one else seems able or willing to understand. Alongside all of the traumas that nonessential personnel have suffered, we’ve also been traumatized by our own customers, particularly the ones who dislike masks. Essential employees all over the country have been screamed at and threatened over asking customers to wear a mask, and some have been assaulted and even killed. We’ve been told time and time again by our management teams that if we must interact with a unmasked customer, we were taking our safety and life into our own hands.

Could we have just stopped telling people to wear a mask? No; that would not be following CDC guidelines and we could get in serious trouble. We received random visits from the Department of Health throughout the pandemic to make sure we were following CDC guidelines, and had they found any infractions, we would have received huge fines for every single infraction.

We learned very quickly that you cannot look at a person and figure out, only by looking at them, whether or not they weren’t wearing a mask because they forgot it in the car and would easily retrieve it or accept a paper mask, or because they were making a statement and wanted to pick an argument that they could record and post on Facebook or send to the media, or because they’d had a mental break and just wanted to break someone’s jaw or shoot them.

Every time I approached a customer to ask them to please put on a mask, I was potentially setting myself up to be assaulted. I have been screamed at, right in my face, and threatened. Coworkers have been spit on. Some jerk threatened to brawl one of my coworkers and only didn’t do it because he was getting too many likes on his Facebook Live feed and he didn’t want to put the camera down to actually fight.

I had no choice but to continue asking customers to mask up. It was my job. I didn’t sign up for this and there’s nothing about this in my job description and I didn’t receive actual hazard pay. But I had no choice. My health and safety, the health and safety of my coworkers, and the health and safety of other customers was too important.

As you can imagine, this constant fear for my life and safety had a negative impact on my mental wellbeing. I think I can safely speak for most essential employees when I say this negative impact is widely felt. It created a trauma response; any time I see an unmasked person, I automatically steel myself for a confrontation and prepare for the possibility that I’m going to be attacked, verbally and possibly physically.

Now that the mask mandate has been lifted for vaccinated people (and knowing that non-vaxxed people are going to lie about their vaccination status in order to not wear a mask), I’m going to be surrounded by unmasked people of unknown vaccination status. I’m going to be constantly hypervigilant about how many unmasked people are around me, constantly mentally preparing for battle (because at this point, I cannot stop the trauma response), and constantly stressed out and high-strung and anxious and panicky. I know I’m not the only essential employee going through this right now.

And the thing about trauma and trauma responses and post-traumatic stress disorder is that we cannot simply adjust. The simplest way to explain PTSD is that we have two brains: our cerebral cortex, where all of our higher thinking happens, and our cerebellum, where our instincts and involuntary actions live. I’ve heard the cerebellum be referred to as the “monkey brain” or the “lizard brain” for how honestly primitive it is. Our lizard brains are the reason we whip our hands off a hot stove and why we duck when something is thrown at our heads; it creates a trauma response or “safety protocol” that it remembers almost forever, and when we experience a trauma, such as burning ourselves on hot metal or having a book collide with our head, it figures out a course of action to take in the future to prevent those traumas from happening again. Once the course of action has worked a few times (“I ducked out of the way of the flying book and did not receive a concussion,”), it is cemented in as a “safety protocol”.

It has one great, defining downside in that it cannot tell time. The memory of being struck in the forehead with a book is as fresh to your lizard brain as if it happened moments ago, even if in reality, it happened years and years ago. The “safety protocols” are usually functional in the time of the trauma, but in other situations, they become dysfunctional. When the safety protocols become dysfunctional, that’s PTSD. For instance, the hypervigilance that protected a person during a time of crisis becomes dysfunctional and exhausting in the usual day-to-day life, but the lizard brain doesn’t know that it doesn’t need to be hypervigilant anymore and cannot shut the protocol down.

The lizard brains of essential employees everywhere have been trained to be extremely cautious, wary, and maybe even fearful of unmasked customers. “Untraining” the lizard brain is something that takes a lot of time to do; I already had PTSD before the pandemic started and I’ve been seeing my therapist about it since 2017, and we’re still unpacking and retraining. I honestly feel a bit lucky in that I had PTSD going into this because I understand what a trauma response feels like and I know I’m not going crazy, that I have an understanding of how PTSD works and I’ve learned to be gentle and compassionate with myself. Not every essential employee has the resources they need to deal with the PTSD they’re struggling with that was brought on by the pandemic, however, and for so many, the “adjustment period” that nonessential personnel are thrusting upon us is going to be hellish.

And that brings me around to the point of writing this. There is a sharp, severe lack of empathy and compassion in this world. There is a severe lack of understanding and sympathy, and a lack of desire to try to understand or be sympathetic. Not everyone lived the past year and a half bored in the house, missing their office plant and their special pen and trying to figure out if they could get away with wearing a button-down top and sweatpants for their Zoom meetings. This isn’t the Pain Olympics and nobody gets a gold medal for Having The Most Trauma, but people suffered. People struggled. People experienced trauma.

To say that “Well, I know I experienced trauma this past year and I’m fine, so everyone else should just be fine too,” is the height of ignorance and lack of empathy. Essential employees have been traumatized. People lost friends and family and their own health. People lost their jobs and struggled to make ends meet. People spiraled into depression and anxiety over being unable to touch or see face-to-face another person.

All I’m asking for, all anyone is asking for, is a little empathy and compassion. Yes, we’re going to have to adjust to seeing unmasked faces. We all know that. But we’re also all going to have to heal first, and there is no time schedule for healing. It happens as it happens, it isn’t easy, and progress isn’t linear. Please stop telling people that they’re going to have to “adjust or just be miserable”.

Be kinder.