Somewhat regularly, after someone new takes a class with me, they’ll gesture vaguely at their face and wish me well: “I hope you feel better soon!” I usually thank them, and feel somewhat confused until I realize, “oh! This person thinks that I am unwell because I am wearing a mask.” Since 2020, many students who take my class regularly have commented that they wish they could see my face, that I have such a lovely smile on social media, that they want to get to know what I really look like.
And I really understand. I also miss smiling at students in the middle of a challenging sequence, and giving them the interpersonal feedback with my own face that this pose won’t last forever. I love sharing the subtleties of a facial expression. It’s one of my favorite things about being a human being, and about being a Black woman, in the world. There are entire languages that are expressed with our faces, the microexpressions, the high-context communication that we only feel when we have a sense of belonging to a place and a people. I miss it too! I miss it too.
Alongside my missing, I also hold some emotional and scientific truths that feel just as important. I was living in upstate New York when the Covid-19 pandemic began, and I will never forget the fear and intensity of those first Covid waves. Watching on my phone and laptop as bodies were piled into refrigerated trucks, hearing my beloved friends in NYC talk about the steady stream of ambulances that pierced every day and every night. Thinking about the impoverished and undocumented folks who never made it to the hospital at all, and died choking on their own fluids while their loved ones tried to tend to them through their own delirious fevers.
I remember watching countless airborne particle models about the effectiveness of masks, most effective when everyone wears them. How health officials said if everyone just masked everywhere for two weeks we could have created a drastically different outcome. Maybe we wouldn’t have to endure the degeneration of our children as they spend every winter with multiple Covid infections that feel just as mild as their ever increasing malaise, brain fog, and organ damage. Maybe we wouldn’t have had to suffer through entire neighborhoods of Black and brown communities losing their elders, their story-keepers, their guardians. Maybe, if everyone had masked and stayed home for Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2020, my mom would still have a partner, my clients would still have parents, and we would have ushered in a new era of collective care where we truly felt like we could and should show up for and with one another.
But perhaps these are just dreams. We will never know the amount of lives that were conserved through the incomplete masking program, the incomplete quarantine periods, and the meager uptake of vaccines. If only we were able to see the impact of the invisible good deeds, would people be more excited to do them? And isn’t that the whole point? We’ve somehow descended into a society where people will only do the right thing if people can see them do it.
I want to reject that. I want to believe that people are inherently thoughtful. That people are trying with whatever capacity they have. I want to reject the ingrained mythology that people are violent and unjust by nature. But where does that lead us? That we’ve been so conditioned through white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism and consumerism that we’ve lost connection to the things that make us able to connect and be with one another? When we sit back and ask ourselves these questions, does it really feel that far-fetched? (To me, it does not).
So why do I continue to mask? When I am teaching yoga I am exposing myself in small spaces to anywhere from 100-250 people a week. People that I am actively encouraging to breathe deeply, fully, and from the depths of their lungs. That is quite a bit of internal air that we are stirring up, and I wear a high quality mask so that I am protected from any seasonal variant of Covid that might be floating through. So that I can continue to teach and offer high quality instruction from a (relatively) non-Covid damaged brain.
My second reason feels like the most simple of them all. The very first of the Yamas.
Ahimsa.
Non-violence, non-harming.
I don’t always wear a mask. I have partners and friends who work in public-facing jobs, and at this point I am far beyond asking people what their vaccination and masking protocols are. It is very reasonable to believe that I will be exposed to and likely contract any number of respiratory illnesses in my everyday life. But if I were to teach a yoga class, a space designed for connection, rejuvenation, and embodiment…and give someone a cold or covid without my knowledge…well. That doesn’t feel non-violent to me.
That’s it. That’s why I mask. It feels very simple to me. Thank you for understanding and practicing with me because of it, and despite it.
