What can wearing a COVID-mask teach us about ourselves and how we look at others? After almost two years of living in a pandemic, we could benefit by thinking not only about how wearing a mask can protect others from us, or us from a deadly disease, but about what mask wearing can teach us about ourselves, and relating to others.
We use the word person to refer to what we are and say we have a personality. The root word here is Latin, persona, meaning a social role, image, or a theatrical mask or appearance we wear in public. Psychologist Carl Jung used the term to mean the social face we present to others, a mask or image we create, or way to hide elements of ourselves. So, in a way we were the masked species even before the pandemic.
From antiquity, masks have been an important element of possibly all cultures. Most staged dramas began with performers wearing masks. In Ancient Greece, for example, the legendary poet, Thespis, was supposedly the first to put an actor on a stage and turn choral recitation into drama. He created larger than life masks that also acted like a megaphone. The first written stories were myths with existential and religious themes, about creation, life and death, heroes, and heroines. The first dramas were enacted myths, so drama emerged from religious ceremonies. But what happens when we wear an actual medical mask in public while doing everyday tasks?
Of course, politics also enters the picture, as the right-wing in the US and elsewhere have turned a medical necessity into a political statement, thus undermining the effectiveness of masks as simply a practical way to prevent the spread of a deadly disease. This influences how we respond to masks and perceive those who wear them, as well as undermines the value of rational, factual based decision-making. It purposefully turns the social sphere, the public commons into a stage for enacting a political and possibly even a religious drama.
Other people are no longer perceived as persons very much like us, but as characters in a drama. And when political leaders of one party threaten and call for violence against another party or against anyone who disagrees with them, that drama can too easily become deadly.
According to a research article by Frontiers in Psychology, COVID masks cover about 60-70% of the area of the face responsible for emotional expression. This makes identification of others or any social interaction more difficult. It limits the ability of other people to read our emotions and hear what we say, as the sound of our words is usually augmented by the sight of our lips moving and changes in facing expression. Consciously reading subtle emotional cues as well as the trustworthiness or honesty of others can be difficult enough for many of us without a mask. A mask obviously diminishes this ability.
How much does a mask become a blank slate for us to project our own personal dramas? We all know how deeply important how our face looks is to most of us. Especially today, with so many suffering from anxiety and trauma, we can feel extremely sensitive, self-judgmental about how we look, afraid of the tiniest “imperfections.” So, how does wearing a mask affect us? And what are we saying about ourselves with which mask we choose to wear?
Think about how you feel when you meet others when wearing a mask. Pause for a minute to stop what you’re doing, take a few slower breaths. And let come to mind the last time you were in public wearing a mask. Where was it? Picture the scene. What clothes were you wearing? How many people did you see? Was it sunny or raining? What did the mask feel like on your face? How well could you see? How confident did you feel? What did you feel when seeing someone else with a mask? Or one not wearing one?
I noticed that when wearing a mask, I can more easily feel hidden, and cut off, isolated. My heartbeat often speeds up. Since awareness of our own sensations tells us about our emotional state, when we have more difficulty reading others we have more difficulty reading ourselves. This, combined with the feel of the mask or possibly interfere with seeing (especially for those who wear glasses), can lead to awkwardness, or a loss of balance, and not only in relating to others. For example, when walking, it is easier to lose touch with the sense of the ground underneath us.
Years ago, when I was teaching high school drama, I once simplified an exercise from dramatist and teacher Keith Johnstone. I introduced the exercise by telling students: “If you’d like, today we could try a very different sort of exercise.” I laid out on one table a variety of masks ⎼ paper mâché ones of sad, happy, older people, children, made by an art class for this purpose; leather, paper, and plastic commedia del arte’ masks from Italy. There was a mirror on a second table. On a third table were props⎼ purses, scarves, jackets, capes, hats, sticks, combs.
Students, if they chose to do so, would one at a time go to the mask table. Choose a mask. Study it. Put it on. Feel it on their face. Then step to the second table and look at themselves in a mirror. Study how it looked and felt. Go to the third table and choose an object they felt went with the mask. Then they wandered around the room. If they chose to, they could relate with another mask-wearer, but using only one or two words.
The exercise was deeply meaningful to students. Drama class was always a place for people to safely try on different faces. This day, we just did it more directly. Which mask a student chose as well as what it felt like to wear it, told them so much about their sense of who they were and what they wished to project to others. We can do the same with a COVID mask.
Today, wearing a mask can give us an opportunity to become more sensitive to the whole person we meet, to look more deeply at the eyes, posture, pace, and balance of their walk, their gestures and the tone of their words. Sometimes now, I am even more open to others when wearing a mask than before since I’m studying them more closely to simply determine if I know them or not. This study can possibly help us see even our families and old friends anew and thus make the upcoming holidays even more of a celebration.
Most of us have realized how dangerous the pandemic is not only to our physical health but every aspect of our lives. Masks, as well as vaccines and social distancing, can go a long way to ending the pandemic and allowing us to once again enter the social world maskless, or at least COVID maskless.
We are always immersed in a social world and often hear the stories of that world playing in the background in our mind. Being more mindful about how wearing a mask affects us can help us be safer, learn valuable lessons about ourselves, and transform the social dramas we enact.
—
This post is republished on Medium.
—