You mean I have to take my mask OFF? So ask many folks when the COVID pandemic lets up in 2022. Mass vaccination and lowering infection rates meant losing a lot that we'd come to enjoy, such as privacy and peace and quiet.. Now, hugging would come back. Bad news for introverts. The infections-down bit is great, but the Return Of The Hug … not.
COVID gave us a blessed escape from near-strangers flinging their arms around us. Then, back to normality, we no longer got to stay far from the madding crowd. It surges up to our doorsteps. And we lose those snaky well-spaced line-ups at stores. Once again people push up behind you and breathe down your neck. Even if it has no COVID germs -- I don't want their breath.
"We want to get back to normal", say extroverts, and people in the media. Oh no we don't, says the introvert. Lockdown meant privacy, working from home, sitting quietly with a good book, escaping the misery of public transport. Freedom.
Remember before COVID when self-appointed media therapist-advisers told us how to "survive the stress" of Christmas, Halloween, Mother's Day, back-to-school and every other normal event in the calendar? These things were treated like major threats to mental health. Then came the Pandemic, and the experts told us how to "survive the stress" of losing all the days we had previously been told were driving us insane. Now we had isolation, mask-wearing, social distancing, peace, quiet, privacy … Oh, wait: to some those are the cure, not the disorder.
In the peace of isolation and privacy we lost resilience to noise, full parking lots, packed shopping malls ... but that's what we got pitched back into when things got 'back to normal'. We no longer have an excuse to avoid things we don't want to do. How many crack under the strain? We've become agoraphobes -- soft, meditative and less combative -- and a new Social Problem looms: People Experiencing Pandemic-Loss.
A new syndrome the mental health media pundits can tell us how to survive: Post Pandemic-Loss Disorder.
But wait, introverts, there's a remedy: if you get vaccinated, just say you didn't. Then people will give you a blessedly wide berth. (You'll be not only dangerous but a criminal -- doubly insulated!) It will be almost like old pandemic times.
So that's a way out after all -- hug the plan to yourself.
A mask story: “Masquerade”,
The
Writers and Readers Magazine, March-April
2021, p. 114.
https://thewritersandreadersmagazine.com/
