5 Years of Masking

On my health during half a decade of COVID and what happens next.

Hello! This is a paid post, but I wanted to say up top that I strongly recommend wearing a face mask, particularly N95 or KN95 masks. I get mine from Green Supply and they come in all sorts of fun colors so you can accessorize with them. COVID-19 is still ongoing, as well as the flu and other illnesses, and it seems like everyone is getting sick. I’ve been wearing a mask for 5 years and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve gotten sick since then. Trust me, you do not want to mess with Long COVID either.

Below is a personal narrative of my own mental and physical health over the past five years. Enjoy!

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It was around this time 5 years ago that things started shutting down. On Wednesday, March 11th, 2020, after weeks of watching nationwide events gradually get cancelled, UConn decided that after in-person classes on Friday we should all hold class remotely for two weeks. We would be staying home for a lot longer than that, of course. It was on that Friday that I got coffee with a friend, something we’ve been putting off for a while; at the end of our meetup we playfully asked each other, “should we hug?” as in “should we be touching each other right now?” That’s how naive we were, and how unequipped we were for what came next.