Mask Mandates and Trauma
Another entry from CovidStoriesArchive.org. Below is the unedited text of a submission detailing one woman’s experience with mask requirements that have forced her to recall and relive feelings
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I need to share why mask mandates have been terrible for me. I have never shared this publicly, but I have to speak up because I know I’m not alone in my experience.
When I was 15 I was raped in the back of a pickup truck. The rapist covered my nose and mouth with one hand and held me down with another hand on my neck. At one point I jumped out of the truck and tried to escape, but he caught me. He caught me with his hand over my mouth and drug me back to the truck.
Every single time I put on a mask I feel creeping panic. It’s been over 20 years since that attack, but the feel of anything over my mouth and nose instantly sends me back to that place. I feel bile in my throat and hands on my neck.
Mask mandates have driven me out of society. I avoid going anywhere that makes me wear them as much as I can. When my kids needed new shoes last spring and I had to take them into a store to try them on, I had a full panic attack in the shoe aisle and my husband had to pull my mask down and remind me I’m not there, I’m safe. This is what it has done to me, and I know there are other women like me out there.
There are so many reasons to not wear masks and not a single legitimate reason to do so against a virus. Not a one. Why do we allow this madness to continue?
I feel for that woman, and I’m so sorry. Thirty years ago, when I was 10, I had surgery to biopsy a tumor in my leg and place a central line for chemo. When I awoke in the recovery room, they had an oxygen mask on me with the flow turned up so high I literally couldn’t take a breath in. I kept pulling the mask off to ask for my mom, and every time the nurse saw me, she slapped the mask back on, told me I needed it to breathe (no, actually I can’t breathe *with* it), and finally informed me that I wouldn’t be allowed to see my mother unless I left the mask on. I can’t imagine why anyone would do this to a child. It was awful. So yes, every time I put a mask on these days, I have a mini panic attack. Yes, when I have to mask around my child, I cry, because I hate that “masks separating children from parents” is now happening in this generation, that I’m re-enacting that trauma for my own child. And it is why I steadfastly refuse to mask my son, ever. I just won’t do it. I won’t do to him what was done to me.