Thinking about what our bodies need

The story of the pandemic is written into our cells.

This past week was our first of mask-less teaching since March of 2020. Two years of encountering only half of my students’ faces and, as so many of us have learned, the top half of a person’s face has zero predictive power for what the bottom half looks like.

So there were a few surprises. One student who I thought of as mostly straight-laced turned out to have a septum piercing under their mask. Two students who looked almost exactly the same to me with their masks on…still looked very similar with their full faces revealed. Then there are the beards, which are so shocking when revealed as to make you do a double-take.

I got a lot of names wrong on the first mask-less day, like my brain could not keep up with the sudden change in input. We are hard-wired for facial recognition and masks interfere with that in complicated ways.

My first maskless day of teaching

Of course, it was a joy to see students’ faces again or for the first time. I was giddy, though I tried to tone it down. Some students still have their masks on and I didn’t want them to feel judged or called out.

The surprising thing to me about being maskless was the simple delight of sitting in a bathroom stall without my mask on. There was something particularly oppressive about being in a deeply private space and still wearing a mask. “My god,” I thought in the beginning of the pandemic, “Is even peeing not sacred?”

It is possible to acknowledge that masks took their toll while also understanding that they might have saved lives. My husband has a red spot on his nose from where his mask rubbed that will hopefully fade away now. This fall I had two of the worst ear infections I’ve ever had, first in one ear and then the other. I can’t help but think this might have had something to do with my mask.

By far the worst moments were when I had a hot flash or panicked or got out-of-breath. Under normal circumstances, my solution would be to focus on my breath, that always-available, built-in, autonomic soothing system. Big exhales lower your pulse rate. They physically calm you down. But the masks took even that away. How could you calm down by focusing on your breath when you still felt like you were suffocating? Even our breath wasn’t really our own.

Masks were just one form of bodily mortification we endured during the pandemic to keep ourselves and others alive. It was hard to drink or eat with the masks on, so we often went thirsty or hungry for longer periods of time. We were in almost constant fight-flight-freeze response, our pulses racing and our muscles tensed. In spite of that, we just kept going, pushing through it and past it, with no time to reset to a healthier baseline.

As much as we might try to deny it in our misanthropic, online world, our bodies need physical contact with other bodies. Hugging someone releases oxytocin and serotonin, those chemicals that make us feel good and safe and loved, as well as boosting our immune system and reducing inflammation. Physical contact is also one antidote to the panic mode of fight-flight-freeze. Online interactions don’t produce those chemicals in the same amounts. Our bodies know that Zoom isn’t the same as sitting next to someone, but we gave that up, too.

I heard many epidemiologists and experts suggest that we should have called what we did physical distancing instead of social distancing. I get what they’re saying, but it seems disingenuous. Physical distancing is social distancing. To pretend that our social lives exist separate from our physical ones is a lie. I am a social body. The social is also bodily.

If you need to be convinced of that, read The Body Keeps the Score, a book about how the traumas we experience in our lives become written into the fabric of our bodies. Abuse, violence, poverty, hunger, neglect—they’re all recorded on a cellular level.

If that’s right, then our bodies are different now than they were two years ago and not just in the normal ways brought about by two years of aging. We have aged faster. We feel older than we should. We have more aches and pains. We’re fatter or thinner. We have mysterious tightness in our chests or flutters in our heart. We find it hard to let go of the habits we formed over the last two years, as harmful as those habits were to our bodies.

We are trauma victims. The story of the pandemic is written into our cells. The damage doesn’t have to be permanent, but it also doesn’t get better by pretending it doesn’t exist.

As we begin to come out of our shells and look around now, our beautiful faces exposed again, let us be gentle. Gentle with our bodies and gentle with others. Let us see each other for what we truly are—fragile, damaged bodies.

In what ways do you feel the pandemic is written onto your body?

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