mandate anxiety
it remains a convoluted psycho snot knot, but my mask phobia seems to be settling into the healing mysteries. i still mostly avert my eyes and ply social distances to the remaining maskites, but the panic attacks are subsiding, both for the random public encounters and the clerks, etc., that i must interact with. communicating through the mask muffle and absence of visual cues remains difficult, but it is not the meanest handicap on my psycho smorgasbord. i seem to be increasingly able to manage.
but each morning finds me still scouring the internet for new mandates and warnings that the maskites are rising again. of the working class heroes who are still being forced to mask themselves, i find myself looking for visual cues of which hate masking as much as i do. the phobia might be settling, but i am still in an obsessive loop.
CAS (covid anxiety syndrome) remains the best name for ^it^ i have found to date, but it is profiled for the germaphobic side of the masked divide. i'm still not properly afraid of THE VIRUS, nor of death by virus. death comes to us all. please don't mandate that i be afraid of that inevitable fact. please don't mandate that i worry more about my next geriatric breath than the future of our children.
sorting. . . looking for words for ^it^.
today i leave the mood icon squarely on okay. methinks i am holding steady, lurching waves in the stormy sees and all. . .
Replies
I am sorry you go through this arfie. Do you think it's an issue over a sense of 'control' for you?
I work in contact with the public so I come from a different side of things - is it a fear of feeling
not being able to see all that a person is expressing that really upsets you?
Does it feel like masked folks are criminals - in a kind of cowboys and indians kind of way?
Sending big hug and I hope you can take joy in a hug from your grandkids today!
now that you have me thinking on it, i believe i see the maskites as far too sheepish to be criminals. for sure, the communication difficulty of being hearing impaired and attempting to communicate by mask muffled sound alone is enough of an obstacle to keep me from knowing what goes on behind the mask. info not available.
my fear of oppression is a strong element in all this. even before the current freedom give away of coronaville, we had far more laws than freedom. odds are, none of our civil rights will be returned to us at the end of this masked madness.
"mandate anxiety" does sound like a good name for this particular ^it^. under that name, it feels like nothing new in my strictly personal healing journey. back in the late 70's, my political rabble rousing was crusader league. the strongest thread in my rabble rousing was the speed with which the u.s. was giving away its civil liberties for the sake of security. while many of my therapy supporters applauded the spirit of my rabble rousing, there was much concern over the manic disorder of my approach. in the early 80's and the advent of my first parenting career, i began to understand the concern. my psychotherapy took some dramatic leaps forward when i gave up watching the network news and tracking current events through the mainstream news publications and began doing my own research. the talking heads and print masters actively manufacture anxiety for the sake of greater dollar profit. i've been through several more go-rounds of this phenom of too many names since then. this one doesn't feel too far different. the last serious bout was after the attacks on the world trade center. the laws born of that fiasco remain a significant, still escalating force in our lives 20 years later. two years into the pandemic management, the mandates are looking ever more like brides waiting on their name change. the mandates wanna be laws when they grow up.
whatever the evers of those whats, my current, strictly personal goal is to give up that morning search for covid news and its masked children. i came here to type this instead of doing the now habitual. girl howdy, two years isn't long on the habit scale, but long enough to establish a pattern. even new habits die hard. as i type here, my fingers are itching for business-as-usual.
processing. . . we see what grows.
so far, so good. i seem to have found my closure for this go-round. culturally, the covidic madness is far from over but i feel like i have found my footing within the ongoing socio-economic chaos. i think. maybe. again, we see what grows.
testing, 1, 2, 3. . .