By Benjamin Schuller
Senior, English Major, IUPUI
On March 4, 2022, or about halfway through the Spring semester, IUPUI’s mask mandate lifted. The statewide mandate had been lifted for a little over a year so now we were finally back to business as usual. All of us have made personal sacrifices, and one of those sacrifices was our social lives.
Like many of you, I didn’t leave my apartment much for most of the pandemic, which caused me to take all online courses for the first year-and-a-half of the pandemic. During COVID, I found human interaction to be terrifying, the virus an ever-present danger, potentially lurking in every conversation I had. Anybody around me became a potential threat, a vector for a scary unknown. The mask became my shield to protect myself not only from COVID, but from other people, too.
You see, I have anxiety and autism. Both conditions make interaction with other people inherently more difficult, limiting my ability to interpret facial expressions and causing me to overthink. Anxiety is a condition that causes paralyzing fear of the unknown, and fear can manipulate my perception of the world more than I’d care to admit. Anxiety can make one look for things that they think are true and perceive them as correct, which can lead to physical symptoms such as panic attacks and heart palpitations.
On top of that, my autism makes interpretation of non-verbal communication difficult, so I often have to memorize non-verbal social cues to avoid making gaffs in conversation. When it comes to verbal communication, I don’t run into too much difficulty, so masking created an environment where I could socialize at much less of a disadvantage than usual, since masked social interactions relied primarily on spoken words. Even so, the reduced interpersonal interactions during the pandemic caused some of my social skills to fossilize, and I found I had forgotten some of the social cues I’d painstakingly memorized over the years.
Popular psychology and neuroscience news organization PsyPost says, “…people with social anxiety may have taken comfort in the lack of social interaction during the pandemic.” They go on to say that staying home unnecessarily could even “exacerbate anxiety,” which is exactly what I have experienced, and continue to experience. Now that the masks are off, I find myself struggling to hold conversations much more than I did before the pandemic, as much of what I’d learned about non-verbal communication over the years has atrophied.
Of course, all humans have the need to socialize, to create connections. I keep seeking them out, only to continue finding myself in awkward situations of ambiguous interpretation. I push people away if they get too close, because exercising my atrophied social skills requires more emotional energy than I can designate to them now, due to my other responsibilities. I won’t claim to have ever been a social butterfly, but despite my disabilities, in pre-pandemic times I had a reasonably active social life. I attended concerts with friends several times a month, but now most of my friends are gone, as is the nature of life.
Despite all of this, I strongly feel that my problems integrating back into society can’t simply be explained away by my neurodivergence. I’ve talked about this with acquaintances quite a bit, and it seems I’m not the only one experiencing some form of re-integration issues. Some people are ecstatic to take the mask off, of course, but I’ve been told by several people that they have experienced some form of anxiety due to these changes.
You would think everyone would be happy that the masks are off, right? Not so fast. All the data hasn’t come in on this subject yet, but an informal poll carried out by VeryWellMind found that more than half of those who responded reported feeling “more freaked out than fine with the unmasking, even if they were fully vaccinated.” This seems to confirm what I had suspected: this social atrophy is not from my disabilities alone, but also from isolation and disconnection.
David Muscovitch, a professor at the University of Waterloo, is one of several prominent researchers focusing on this topic. “Many people who didn’t struggle with social anxiety before the pandemic may find themselves feeling more anxious than usual as we emerge out of the pandemic and into a more uncertain future — especially within social situations where our social skills are rusty and the new rules for social engagement are yet to be written,” he wrote in a recent paper.
So, what does this mean, exactly? For one, COVID is still out there, and many have anxiety about catching the illness. And perhaps we fear, deep down, exposing both our beauty and our imperfections to the outside world when we unmask. It’s understandable that some are struggling to adjust; change doesn’t happen overnight, nor is it generally easy. What’s important is that we work through our reservations, overcoming them and becoming stronger than we were before the pandemic.