I inspired an entire community to show its face. I'm not the only one with this power.
Now that journalistic credentials represent artistic license, we* want in on the fun
By last summer, when over 100,000 Americans had died of a result of a virus we should have known was transmittable, I knew that a lot of people had gotten sick—and that the talk on social media of a pandemic was no hoax. I remember one friend calling me from her private jet—just to joke about how I had gone from reading about ten books a week to about twenty ever since others had started losing their jobs.
She wasn’t kidding. I needed to know, more than ever, what we needed to do and how we could still thrive despite everyone we knew being wildly unlikely to survive. An information junkie from the crib, I can never get enough of things that pertain to me and my life on the Internet.
How likely is it we were all at mortal risk? Only the governor of New York State (whom I can’t really call a close friend) and his brother on CNN seemed to have a handle on the health side of things—until the right-wing media destroyed them both out of shame. After President Trump was deposed and the dust from the attempted bulldozing of the U.S. Capitol by the boogaloo boys was cleared, we cheered—for Kamala the pioneer, but also for twinkling Joe, having finally made the progressive switch we’d all hoped for. We now had two true leaders in the White House.
But for the time being, things at that point were worse for all of us, right then—especially those who were once living and had lost that status for good.
As always during a crisis affecting millions of others, possibly more, I wondered how my background as a runner and writer could help. So I started typing—and moving my legs. And that’s when I noticed so many scared runners using masks, by themselves, raising cloth to face even when they were a hundred feet, even miles, from anyone.
From the start, we knew masks indoors were vital—and we shouldn’t pretend they haven’t saved tens of millions of U.S. lives. But they have denied us our uniqueness—for our faces, like fingerprints, are like DNA. This is especially true for my generation. When you look at our faces, you are looking at snowflakes. All are different; all are tender, and many are the faces of tomorrow’s leaders.
At one point during the shutdown, I even stopped updating my Wikipedia page. After all, who was I, as a “me” with a catalog of laboriously accumulated and sanitized details, if everyone under the literal sun had now a mask on?
Had we all lost face?
I noticed friends at other publications and blogs struggling more than ever to find worrisome things to write about. Naps? Those get old, as does daydreaming of shopping for swimwear at still-closed malls. The paychecks were still coming, but: Masks!
I had my tried-and-true routine to help keep me, myself, grounded—but I’m lucky enough to be resilient. Every time I tried calling a new therapist to set up an appointment, I heard the same thing, several times a week: “We have no openings for at least five years.” (This, in spite of me disclosing to one bored receptionist after another that I have one of the best health plans employers provide.) I was at the marijuana dispensary every Friday morning for my quarter-ounce of Slazerbeam, and I’d see the same unhappy, slack, despairing faces every time, black crescents of skin under sunken eyeballs a testament to a puff too far for those without the hard-earned blessing of self-moderation.
And body size was everywhere; men keep it in every conversation these days, and we should reject this in the power position, in wide-legged stances with chins and chests thrust defiantly outward. Friends who run almost as much and as fast as I do reported the agonizing experience of stepping on the scale to see a slip—especially on the Thursday before the Zoom 4th of July office party. And my heart went out to them—and I was determined to show they all had a unique-as-DNA-as-fingerprints snowflake-face, too.
I, you see, had my own unique countenance of the pandemic, but shareable by and to all and one.
Also, people of color and transgender individuals, especially athletes, have been hit almost as hard as those with blue Twitter checkmarks and struggling with size, as culture has lasered its COVID hatred at women like my friends; though strong, they are not immune to these real concerns, just as they know BLM, et cetera. Oy!
To help, I found myself thinking on an easy, if unplanned, 24-miler lately: What if we didn’t wear masks, and trusted both most of the science and all of who we are? When I reached the edge of Boulder and smashed face-first into the invisible dome now enclosing the city, I had a sudden answer—and a bloody nose.
I didn’t even have to think; I just turned and yelled:
”RUNNERS, TEAR OFF THOSE MASKS!”
At that moment, I saw myself looking down from a mesa of prairie dogs, on all the Boulder paths and its game and active citizens, and they all heard me. It was perhaps the echo off the Third Flatiron or a prevailing wind, who knows. But I looked down and saw their tiny faces, hundreds of real faces, as they gazed up at me, as if newborns for the first time in their lives. They were happy, they were whole, and they were their true selves for once.
I thought I saw a smile. Or two. Or more.
Shortly afterward, I bellowed “Pink stars are falling in lines,” had a brief grand mal seizure, and jogged home, dazed but fully energized for the first time in many difficult months for the world. I knew I had taken an important step, not for me but for everyone with my precise chaotic mix of psychological foibles.
It was okay, once again, for all of us to be our own kind of snowflake. And free, once again, from worrying about small things we can’t change, when there is so much we can change.
Oh boy. Does anyone know a good rhinoplasty place, other than Tom’s?