At the start of this pandemic, with the stay-at-home orders, I had a week of vacation that I needed to use. I was supposed to be traveling with my husband to my ancestral homes in India (and to be eating all of the street food my stomach could handle), but I was forced to spend the time in solitude in central Ohio.
Thankfully, one of my co-interns also had that week off. So we spent the week simultaneously watching movies and messaging each other all of our thoughts and feelings and realizations.
One of these movies was Crip Camp, a documentary about a summer camp for disabled teenagers (style guide for referring to disabled individuals/individuals with disabilities), many of whom then went on to become major players in the Disability Rights movement in the 1970’s.
Now, my friend and I are both pediatricians in an extremely large and busy children’s hospital, so we frequently care for children and teenagers with disabilities. And I, for one, hope that I do enough to create a safe space for them to be themselves. However, there were so many assumptions that I realized I had been making when watching this documentary, how much my personal perceptions of the individuals in this population had in my view limited their personal lives, their experiences, their humanity.
I was reminded of this when I read a beautiful narrative in the New York Times about a woman, Helen Hoang, a romance novelist, who “comes out” with autism to her family (you should definitely also read the other two essays in the series). In her essay, “Coming Out with Autism,” she heartbreakingly describes the way her family accepted her diagnosis at face-value, but didn’t truly allow her to be herself. Thus, she continued to wear the mask to hide her autism every day and has experienced a state called “autistic burnout.”
It made me wonder, how much of a toll do we exact on others by not letting them be themselves?
The prompt for this week is this:
“Write about masks.”
You have as much or as little time as you would like to take. See you next week.
References:
- Hoang H. (2020). Coming Out with Autism. [online] The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/us/disability-reveal.html [Accessed 15 July 2020].
More unedited writing of mine. Ten minutes all about masks.
Masks obscure the truth. Sometimes it can be nice to hide behind one, honestly, because showing and sharing all of the ugliness would be too much to bear. Not only for my colleagues or my patients or my family – sometimes I put on a mask to hide from myself.
But when is it ok to remove it? To be free from judgement? We preach a lot that you should be free to be yourself and that if those around you don’t like it, that is their problem to deal with, not yours.
But it becomes your problem. Negative comments, feelings, energy – it isn’t benign, and it wears on you day in and day out. Judgment from being yourself vs. a mask to hide yourself, both are exhausting. So what do you do if there’s nowhere else to go? Anyone who says to live for yourself doesn’t live in a society or with a partner or friends or colleagues or anything.
Sometimes that vacuum does sound nice, though. Can I join you in your hermit lifestyle?
Out in space, where I don’t have to choose – what does my public persona look like today? Why can’t it just be what I feel like, warts and all. Warts, insecurities, impairments, strengths, weaknesses, and all?
Space sounds great. Astronaut ice cream and no masks allowed (except to prevent the spread of COVID-19).
Writing for Wellness 