Pt 1 - Masking and the identity crisis facing us.

Jane Isley
Apr 23
4 min read

Something I saw happen after the mandates stopped. I cannot be the only one.

I’m going to discuss something I haven’t touched on before, and it’s been traveling around in my head for a long time now. (It turns out this is gonna be a two-part article because I seem to be unable to condense stuff as usual.)

I know I can’t be the only one who’s thought about this.

It has always felt (to me, at least) that what our children went through and felt during those turbulent years was never fully acknowledged.

Think about it: one day, they’re planning sleepovers, prom, and graduation. The next day, they are told they can’t leave their house for “2 weeks,” and if they do, they better mask up.

I’m stating for the record: I am not talking about conspiracies or my views on the vaccine, nor will I respond to those. This is about what our children went through and the ripple effect I watched happen.

I had the opportunity to have a conversation with a young lady about her personal experiences during the pandemic since she was in school at the time.

I asked her to tell me what she felt and what she remembered the most.

I learned she was at the tail end of middle school, going into high school, when masking and the various mandates went into effect. At first, it was just the basics she was telling me, like a person would when asked how their day went.

As she kept talking, though, I watched her expressions and her body language start to shift. At one point, she crossed her arms together and ended up hugging herself, and stayed like that for the rest of our conversation.

Then came the use of sarcastic humor. The kind people often use when talking about something difficult or painful, but don’t want to get emotional about.

I’m not attempting any in-depth psychological interpretation for every micro-expression or movement I saw. I’m not an expert in any field, but I could see her; I know what I saw.

Something was still left behind, not the same as the haunting of a traumatic incident, but not nothing either.

She opened up about her struggles of having to teach herself sometimes with the assistance of Google and the constant frustrations of not being able to raise her hand and having a teacher come over to help.

Her grades slipped from a 3.7 to 1.3; this was quite upsetting to her, and I don’t blame her. Could you imagine watching your hard-earned grades drop like that? That, all on its own, is a huge hit mentally and emotionally for a student, to be doing so well and watch it slip away.

She talked about how students took advantage of online classes, learning how to trick the settings to look like they were active but instead were watching TV or playing video games. As more weeks of mandates kept getting added many students became overly disruptive and generally a pain in the ass.

With the accountability structure gone, why would we expect anything less from kids?

Some of the more distressing things she told me were how friends were separated from each other based on their last name when they started school classes again.

Everyone had to line up 6 feet apart; no sitting next to each other, eating lunches together, venting, playing, whispering, hugging, or holding hands.

They were always lined up in sync with the mandates while their smiles were hidden away for years. Only the eyes were seen, and our eyes show our sorrows.

young student wearing a mask during covid — **Kelly Sikkema**

The worst for her was when she would get called by the office, told to grab her things, and to leave. Because an anonymous student sitting 6 feet away from her tested positive.

She told me how this happened one time, moments before an important test, she begged them to let her take it, but they said no and sent her home for two weeks. She never did end up taking that test.

This is just a very brief sample of one young student’s experience, and it left an impression on her that I don’t believe will ever go away.

We now have a nation (primarily young, but all ages have been affected) of people who don’t know who they are and believe every emotion they feel has to be validated by everyone around them.

While there was already a lot that contributed to this pressure point finally boiling over, COVID-19 was the final trigger that needed to be pulled.

The world was thrown into pandemonium, not just for 2 weeks but for years.

The constant fear of getting sick, death tolls around every corner, planning out even the smallest errand, socialization taken away, watching parents' jobs be threatened, watching them lose jobs, and vaccine mandates that some did not want to be a part of.

Our children witnessed this for years, their minds absorbed everything.

End of part 1. I will be following up on part 2 by talking about trauma responses, groupthink, social contagion, PTSD, and more.

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