Fixation and Preparation are strange bedfellows
An Introduction to this newsletter thing via a story about masks.
In the olden days of Twitter, in the even older days of Facebook, and in the prehistoric times of Friendster (shout out if you’re old enough to remember it and thought it better to have than a MySpace account), my opening line after joining one of these services was unironically and sadly earnestly the following:
:Taps microphone: Testing, testing. Anybody out there?
I spare you from that today because I fully assume that there is no one out there to respond. I need not test a mic. I just need to believe the little lag of confidence that always situates me into these things, then scampers off to run errands, and returns right before I take my leave of shame.
That sounds dark. It needn’t. It’s just the way my mind chooses to cope with attention-or the lack thereof.
All this to say I have a Substack. Hello to [the understood] You.
I started this page because I wanted to talk about the ideas and thoughts that swirl around in my mind but don’t fit in more traditional channels. Some of that will be my overly concerned feelings about television things (for example, I’m really strangely enjoying Pivoting on Fox in the same way I enjoyed Girls5Eva—I don’t know what to say), race and television and movie things, fandom feelings that I need to exorcise because it’s really time to try to move past the pain of Bangel.1
Today I want to discuss my current hoard. Rev yourselves up—I’m taking us on a journey.
Listen: I am no doomsday prepper neither am I a survivalist. The idea of having a lot of “necessary” stuff in one place at one time unnerves me a little. Sure, I can have a plethora of candles, bar soaps, and bath salts ready to launch in times of need but detergent? Pink Salmon? Canned corn? Dove Dry spray?
No. I…I cannot.
But you know what I have indirectly become a hoarding aficionado of?
Face covering masks. Even now as I sit at my couch and touch the floor, my feet reach for the wire and wicker basket that houses the spendy German heel cream that I leaned on during the thick of Pandemic 1 when pedicures seemed as ahistorical as a drive-in, a jasmine body butter that I forget I own and then remember I own it and enjoy it when I put it on and then put it back in the basket and forget again, and masks.
Yes. I collect masks. Their weird smells and straps, they comfort me.
Not just one type either. I’ve got stashes from the early days when American Apparel was selling cloth ones that could seal to your mouth but in the same way as a pacifier. I’ve got Oura cloth masks that were obnoxiously expensive but that suggested to me —at the time— they did magical work. I had an actual respirator that someone recommended on one of the social media apps that I would have kept had the embarrassment of never actually figuring out how to wear it correctly, even with YouTube instructional videos, not been ever present.
Mostly though, I have KN95s with ear loops, KN95s (of many colors) with adjustable ear straps, a host of N95s (duckbills, 3Ms, WellBefore’s brand) and N99s.
This sounds like I’m describing weapons. And, I suppose you’d be right. For me, masks functioned as armor that could protect me from the invisible omniscient, omnipotent force called Covid 19.
Now, what’s interesting and perhaps ironic about all this is that I have had Covid (untested) TWICE. Once, while I was attending the Sundance Film Festival back in January 2020 and I just thought it was like real bad cold/maybe some light pneumonia. To be fair, the Sundance flu has always been something but I mean, even The Hollywood Reporter thought it might have been a superspreader event.
I returned home still quite sick although I would have never admitted it to myself. Sucking down berry flavored Ricolas, sitting in meetings and teaching full voiced for 170 minutes at a time in class. I remember one night maybe a week or two post infection, I was coughing so bad during class a student graciously bought me a bottle of water from the machine.
At some point I went to the doctor and by that time all that seemed left was a touch of bronchitis. Several yellow Gatorades, an inhaler, and a Zpack later, I felt a bit more on the mend.
Only for the world to fall in on itself.
The second time I (unofficially) contracted Covid the following things happened just 45 days prior: George Floyd was murdered, riots were in the streets, my father was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, my father passed from cancer a month later, and we had a funeral and backyard repast. I think between the shock, the speed, the many very confusing feelings I had about my dad, how he wasn’t a good guy, how he attempted to create havoc for us even until his last breath, how I watched it happen, how overcome with frustration I was that I still felt the need to grieve, how disappointed I was that my body was throwing me in what I now know were panic attacks, and also how I had never been in a funeral home let alone helped to plan a funeral with my siblings, contacted an estate attorney, helped produce a repast, filled out bureaucracy forms, all the while unconsciously becoming more and more vigilant about Covid, I don’t think I had any reserves left to absorb any more shocks.
So on the day I realized I very likely had Covid it was 6 days after my middle sister had come down with it and a few minutes after I got off the phone with my kid sister who told me she had it too. Somehow something I hadn’t paid attention to that morning came roaring back. Friends sent me a lovely gift basket of candles and bath stuff and I remember not being able to smell the fragrance but chalked it up to it being a light scent. I put the candle to my mother’s nose and she smelled it fine but when I did—I smelled nothing.
I think…I don’t remember the order of it but I think I lifted my hands in the air as if I was being accosted and I have this visceral memory of feeling like whatever energy or resilience or bounce back I used throughout my life to hang on to myself was gone.
It felt hollow inside. Like the panic when you start a car and it won’t turn over. It doesn’t even make a sound. I was in that moment both the car and the panic.
It was a far, far milder case than whatever I experienced in January. No taste or smell. Bad muscle aches where my heavy ass legs felt so heavy I would sit in my mother’s giant tub with jets filled to the brim with epsom salt and cbd bath bombs forcing my mind to chill.
Because that for me was the true illness. Researchers research and that I did. I read and read and read up on Covid, holding my cell phone in my hand 24 hours a day, each time I had a question or an intrusive thought. I memorized the day to day symptoms and with not a small amount of terror waited for the horror of day 6 which, at the time, represented the moment where the cytokine storm would mount up or not. This, of course, becomes a habit and a little bit of a compulsion. Bookmark this for later.
The shame of it too. Ohhh the shame. I had done nothing but somehow I couldn’t be unconvinced that my father’s death wasn’t like a portend to my own destruction by some invisible evil waiting to attack. Bookmark this for later too.
Covid ended. I was weak from not moving around much and you know, the body fighting off a terrible enemy. School was about to begin. Covid testing required for re-entry.
All I knew was that my reserves were still far from replenished. I was terrified of something I had endured twice like the final girl who survived against Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street. I even feel bad about that analogy because that’s how I felt but that wasn’t the reality of it in my case physically. But in my head? Yes.
I developed an acute panic disorder and health anxiety. Bookmark that for the next entry. Gotta keep you coming back, right?
But to circle back to the ultimate point of this essay: the only thing I could control in my mind was what I put on my face.
The researcher researched for hours about masks and the best ones and, you know, I was gonna write this off on my taxes because this was part of my business expense for being an educator and teaching in person— IN PERSON—with HEALTH ANXIETY.
Have mercy.
So, I spent a lot of money on all the masks. Learning how they worked and what electrostatic charges are and the most effective ways to seal it to the face. The knowledge of what they did. The visual illustrations of how to put them on correctly. They comforted me.
My basket of masks never ran out. Even during that halcyon period in May and early June where I even might have gone out without my big deal ones opting for the simple cloth masks with simple filters.2 It sat in the same place as always—under my coffee table. At some point I even considered what I might do with the unused 3Ms and the KN95s I had left.
So silly.
And, yet, as I began the school year again knowing I had them there, close enough to wear my foot could touch them, helped me have a little bit of courage.
And, as my resilience began to slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, we still ain’t quite at half tank yet refill, my preparedness and my hypervigilance/fixation could be used toward something beneficial than my own compulsions.
Going on Twitter to tell y’all to get your mask game together. Repeatedly. And with vigor.
I think when I share my masks and my knowledge about them with people, I think it affirms that strange little part of myself that felt terrorized that the skills she gained to protect herself were worth it somehow.
So, that’s my Substack intro story. I think I have a few more entries from this really strange moment in my reality. But mostly? This s a place where I practice enjoying writing about the things on screen that I enjoy or am supposed to enjoy again.
Hang in there with me. Where will we go. Let’s find out.
Next post come soon.
“I’ll never forget.”
Except for airplanes. I always pulled out my big gun masks for airplanes and airports.