WHY I AM NOT AN EVERMASKER

13 Lessons from Still Coviding (Living as a VERB in an ongoing pandemic)

…. it seems that the lesson that the oligarchs running the world are trying to send is that the Covid Competent are sad, lonely and just plain mistaken and anxious and mentally and emotionally unwell. Whether it’s The Atlantic pathologizing “Evermaskers”or The Spectator claiming that “Social Long Covid” is the real problem, not, you know, real people actually getting sick.- John Dupuis (The Covid-Is-Not-Over-Newsletter)

To be clear, I am not suggesting that you read the article “The Evermaskers” from The Atlantic if you haven’t; to that end, I will not even link it. But I will use it as a backdrop to share many hard-earned reflections that have grown out of the pain-filled soil of these past five years of Still Coviding. Some of these lessons already have essays in my substack that may be helpful to read first (like the one linked below) and some that have yet to be written. I would love to hear from you- questions, dissent, agreement, expansions, contractions, your lessons- all things are welcome, and if you prefer to email rather than comment publicly, you can reach me at heartsonhorizon@gmail.com Keep an eye/ear out for a substack live soon on these topics and more sometime soon. (You need to download the app to get notifications of live chats taking place).

1. Sustained resistance against government-driven policies/actions requires adaptations of almost every psychosocial dynamic in your life, most of which you probably didn’t notice until they were messed up or missing. Resisting the virus is now something happening almost exclusively amongst people who have spent the last 5 years making adaptations to every single domain of our lives, and most of them are psychosocial with long tentacles of impact into literally everything: our finances, careers, where we live, on and on the list of adaptations goes.

2. Willingness to take off/put on a mask is a good litmus test for how self-referencing an individual is around issues of health and wellness and/or how they respond to peer pressure/psychosocial dynamics, but it is not necessarily correlated with upholding values like equity and inclusion, which leads me to #3.

3. It takes more than sharing the societally maligned practice of masking to build a healthy, mutually supportive friendship.

4. Willingness to accept variations in masking quality is a good litmus test for how flexible and inclusive a person is in general.* I don’t mean accept as in lower your standards for the air you breathe, but accept as in not gatekeeping them as “not serious” because their mask isn’t as good as yours. ( the rest of the lessons will elaborate on ways I might suggest handling this should you need to share air with someone with a lower quality mask).

5. Party labels and platforms (noun descriptors) tend to create static identities that can distract people from the systemic commonalities of most of our current challenges of experiencing forced consent to abandon our freedom of choice around our bodies, our property, our freedom, our rights, our relationships, etc.

6. “We must resist the Covid virus” and “We must resist the virus of fascism” are accurate but incomplete statements. The truth is we must resist AND adapt to this moment of an ongoing pandemic and an ongoing takedown of our democracy. The greater purpose is neither to resist nor to adapt. For our family, the greater purpose is to survive the pandemic and use the challenges it brings to become self-led leaders who value the health and lifespans of ourselves and others while working toward a more inclusive, free, and equitable society.

Without a greater purpose, it’s easy to get stuck in a specific season or identity and either resist or adapt the goal when, in reality, one of them alone is only one half of a polarity that must be leveraged to reach the greater purpose. Having a compelling greater purpose makes us dynamic and active, which is critical because the “Still Coviding lifestyle” only works as a verb! Those of us who are still coviding don’t think or act like the pandemic is something from the past, or part of an old story long forgotten. As a result, we have been labeled things like Evermaskers for many reasons. But in my view, it’s primarily because our culture refuses to engage in both-and thinking and thus only knows how to boil things down enough to make them digestible, simple, and therefore marketable. This label also casts a sense of permanence around something the powers- that- be benefit from: making the act of masking seem so outlandish and unreasonable the masses never consider it again.

But given our collective experience over the last 5 years, is it more or less likely that being called Evermaskers will increase our influence and impact on public health and personal well-being? Given what I write about, you likely know my answer, but I would love to hear yours. I refuse to be “nouned” or described as an “…ever” anything except mother or partner. I refuse to accept a label from someone who has never tasted the complexity of the both-and “verbing” lifestyle we have embraced and developed within our communities for five years with no help from the rest of the world. I realize that “ever adapting, ever-resisting” doesn’t have the same simple marketable ring. It’s too wordy, too unmarketable, too uncertain. It’s too all the things our overculture hates, which gives me even more reason to embrace it and refuse their snarky labels.

7. Demanding that protestors avoid masking and criticizing those who do when they likely have not been masking since 2021 is a form of cosplaying hall monitors for a regime that could not CARE LESS about the actual reasons ANY of us mask. What wild assumptions must be made to assume this regime is interested in moving beyond binaries (good-bad) into any form of complexity? Doesn’t trying to push this “don’t mask unless it’s medical” move us closer to calling those on the same side as us against fascism “bad”? Does this regime seem like they will take their time parsing out the reasons for anything before they take an axe to it? It’s almost like you have to believe their primary motivation isn’t forcing us all to consent to a long and growing list of restricted freedoms to move in this direction, and I simply don’t.

That said, It would be hard to find someone living the still coviding lifestyle who doesn’t harbor some hard feelings about how we have been systematically pushed to the sidelines of life by those who couldn’t get back to 2019 fast enough. But we need to ask ourselves what our greater purpose is and use that to guide our actions toward those standing on the same side as us in fighting fascism. I see this as yet another opportunity to start new conversations about clean air and masks that haven’t been on the table since Biden said we could all unmask in 2021. I saw a great comment in one of our SC groups wherein someone suggested that we could inform people masking for identity reasons that masking doesn’t really conceal their identity as people think it does AND to encourage them to continue doing so for their health and everyone else’s. It’s a built-in “both-and” moment, and I’m thrilled to see that many in our communities seem to be treating it as such, taking masks to protests, etc. We all know nothing good comes from large crowds gathering unmasked and spreading more virus. Let’s create some new messaging and create opportunities to share the knowledge, resources, and skills we’ve amassed over the last 5 years rather than playing hall monitors: “We all have to stay healthy as much as possible for as long as possible to resist the virus of fascism or something like that.”

8. Everything is political, and almost everything done publically is performative or assumed to be. Playing judge and jury about which is which and deeming one worthy or acceptable is a game that lands us dangerously close to the regime we are resisting.

9. The standards and values I choose to hold and how I think, especially how I feel about other people, their choices, etc., constantly shape my character and heart and generate a forcefield or “aura” of how it feels to be around me. My husband, children, and I will live with the impact of the meaning I have made of this incredibly challenging five-plus years for the rest of my life, which hopefully includes the end of this pandemic and regime. There’s nothing easy about it, but I refuse to lower my standards, drop my values, and become bitter ( although it often feels deserved to feel that way). In the words of Sartre, “There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours” and I don’t intend to let the values of those I’m resisting seep into the wellsprings of my own heart, mind, and spirit.

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus

10. Emotional hygiene is as important as clean air. Yes, clean air DOES reside at the bottom of the infamous Maslow’s pyramid because, without it, we may not get the chance to move toward self-actualization or even care about our emotions and how they can shape our character if we don’t have basic safety- but in the end analysis meeting the needs throughout the entire pyramid is part of having a meaningful human experience and contributing to a better world. There isn’t a rule somewhere that says we won’t experience negative impacts on our lives for ignoring our social-emotional health and hygiene because we were (understandably) consumed with meeting the safety needs of ourselves, our children, and society while the rest of the planet walked away from the bottom of the triangle.

But we are now in year 5 and counting. Part of dynamically focusing on adapting and resisting ( being a VERB) means accepting the seasons when we can’t focus on more than the bottom of the triangle and making good use of the times we CAN focus on cultivating our emotional hygiene, relationships, empathy, and personal growth. I recently saw a compelling Instagram post in which Prentis Hemphill cautions against the ongoing divestment from empathy. Indeed, many of us who have been still coviding all these years see the global response to covid and years of minimizing it as a way to desensitize us to the destruction of diversity, equity, inclusion, empathy, health, freedom, and even life itself, all of which has led us to where we are today- but we cannot divest from empathy.

11. Creativity is ESSENTIAL to a verb-driven lifestyle like Still Coviding.

12. Using “and instead of but” creates a more inclusive, influential form of communication (e.g., it might sound something like this, “I’m thrilled that you clearly respect the science around airborne transmission, AND since you’re already making that belief public by wearing a surgical, I just wanted to ask if you knew that you’re a head strap away from substantially increasing the protections you’re already committed to?”) But sadly, from most of the communication I’ve heard and read it sounds more like a blunt “surgicals don’t work.” Even hearing, “I’m glad you’re masking, but surgicals don’t work,” would be an improvement. But if we took just a second to add a little complexity, accessible through the power of an “AND,” could we open the door to curiosity, influence, and inclusion of more people in adapting and resisting? It’s worth a shot in my book.

Instead of talking about what people need, we have trapped ourselves in the opposition’s story…. We are a ‘no’ and a ‘don’t’ and a ‘can’t’ and people cannot attach themselves to the absence of a story. Every one of these ‘nos and ‘don’ts’ and ‘can’t’ is a reaffirmation of the opposition’s story; this does not tell people what we are for – what you fight, you feed.- Anat Shenker-Osorio

13. I had always loved Kahlil Gibran’s quote, “Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast,” in fact, it used to be written on the chalkboard wall that wrapped around my entire living space during those blessed years of worldwide travel I loved so much. But these words have become just as impactful in a radically different way over these last 5 years. They represent the verb-based way of living my husband, and I have assumed rather than settling into a static location or identity. These words remind me that I have chosen not to focus on a destination- but to embrace the complexity of the journey, no matter how cliche it sounds. I think the rest of the passage from The Prophet is a perfect ending:

But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.
Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.
It shall not be a glistening film that covers a wound, but an eyelid that guards the eye.
You shall not fold your wings that you may pass through doors, nor bend your heads that they strike not against a ceiling, nor fear to breathe lest walls should crack and fall down.
You shall not dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living.
And though of magnificence and splendour, your house shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing.
For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.

I am not trapped or tamed, nor am I living in secrecy. I am not living in fear or hiding; rather, I am fiercely guarding and living life. I am ever adapting, ever resisting, and ever boundless. I inhabit the songs and silences of this season of my life—it’s true I wouldn’t have chosen it, but I have chosen to embrace it.

Yours in adapting AND resisting,

Rebekah

P.S.

Poetry is giving me life these days, so I must include another from one of my favorite poets, Andrea Gibson. It fits perfectly in this very spot.