SIPA STORIES: Dear Masks

By: Andrew McCracken

I have a love-hate relationship with masks.

They have filtered out pounds of particles from the air to keep me healthy over the past year and a half. For that, I am grateful. However, I resent how it has affected me socially.

Earlier this year, I moved to New York City to attend Columbia University for graduate school. I am living in the biggest city in the US, surrounded by many interesting people – and yet, I feel somewhat alone.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I really appreciated – enjoyed, even – the practice of ‘masking up’. Sure, they can be uncomfortable, but fear of getting sick from COVID-19, especially given I have asthma, was greater than any inconvenience or discomfort.

But at this stage in the pandemic, while I still appreciate the safety masks provide, the protection offered by the vaccines has allowed me to see other effects they have on me than simply protecting my health.

Despite being slightly introverted, I am also adaptable and can overcome social stresses that come with moving from a small undergraduate school in rural Virginia to the center of metropolitan NYC. I was unaware, however, how much wearing a mask over the 18 months had changed some of my social habits. 

I enjoy conversation and derive a lot of my daily energy from it, or at least I used to.

I live in a small town in Virginia and often cannot go to the grocery store without running into five or more people I know. Sometimes that can be inconvenient, so when masks started to provide anonymity, I talked to fewer and fewer people until it became a habit to avoid them even when I recognized them.

During my senior year of undergraduate studies through 2020 and 2021, masks protected me and many other students from catching or spreading COVID-19. But again, they hindered my ability to recognize people and reinforced the habit of simply not talking to anyone when walking around.

I lived with five other guys in college, and we had a group of friends who would regularly see each other, so while the semi-isolation mandated by the school was a weird experience, I was never alone. In-person classes were still awkward as I struggled to recognize people or overcome the anxiety of starting a conversation. I have a low, slightly muffled, voice as it is. Masks made me virtually unintelligible, especially if there was any other noise around.

Now, living in NYC for the past four months, there are still some things I love about masks. One unanticipated effect is now that it has started to get cold outside, masks help keep my face warm when walking around, whereas in the 80–90-degree summer, wearing a mask outside might have led to heat stroke. Also, being surrounded by eight million of your closest friends and a couple million tourists crammed into a densely populated area makes the possibility of contracting COVID-19 more real, especially with new variants emerging.

Masks and school in the city are a different story. I was excited to meet many new people, and I did. But wearing masks in class makes it hard to recognize people I knew and even more difficult to introduce myself to people I didn’t because I can’t see their face and the social cues that come from it. That problem still exists outside of the classroom where masks aren’t required because I still don’t know what some people look like to begin with.

Masks have created a social anxiety for me. I still really enjoy talking to people, but the habits reinforced since coronavirus became the new normal have made me measurably less social and less happy because of it.

I find morsels of encouragement throughout the day, like when I can start a conversation with a random masked Columbia student at a local deli, or try to introduce myself to a classmate I haven’t talked to across an entire semester. I like being sociable – but it is as if masks have convinced me I don’t.

Masks shouldn’t take it personally. I really like and appreciate the safety, and now winter warmth, that they provide me. I recognize that they are still a necessary public health measure, even as I hope that, one day, they won’t be. I won’t be sad when our close relationships with masks end, assuming of course that they will, because hopefully that will mean the start of many new ones for me.