Before COVID-19, I had body image issues. In fact, my first ever Her Campus article was about embracing my tummy. But after a year of wearing masks in public, I seemed to have developed a new insecurity: the way the bottom half of my face looks.
Some days I will look at myself in the mirror and hate what I see — full cheeks, a less defined chin and my big nose. When I imagine outfits, I automatically see a mask too. When I take off my mask in the break room at work to eat a snack during my 15, I feel self-conscious about who will see me without my mask on. Granted, a lot of that may just be from being in a global pandemic for this long, but it’s also out of a developing aversion to looking at my face without a mask.
For years before 2020, the only thing I was self-conscious of on my face was my nose, but I had grown to accept that it made me unique. But now, I will scrutinize everything that is covered by the mask. My personal theory is that because I haven’t been physically looking at my face without a mask in so long, I’ve grown unaccustomed to seeing it bare. Not wearing a mask is like forgetting to wear a shirt at this point, and that might be why seeing myself without a mask just feels so… wrong.
So how do I work to love my face again? It sounds really cheesy, but one of the first things I want to start doing is looking in a mirror and saying “ah, yes, that is a face.” No picking apart the things that make me uncomfortable, no saying that I hate myself or I look ugly. Typically the suggestion to combat body negativity is to go straight to body positivity, but that is a really big jump to make for me, personally. Neutrality might be a better goal to aim for in the short term.
I haven’t seen anyone else talk about this yet, but I have a feeling that I’m not alone. This article is for all of us.