The Privilege and Pain of Video Calls

I've never looked at myself as much as I have since March.

Pre-COVID, I wasn't so humble that I didn't appreciate a perfect selfie, or stop an extra minute in front of the mirror on a good hair day, but I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about my looks. My spouse has often described me as "visually low maintenance." Being quarantined for the last three months has been a dream in some ways. I stopped wearing underwear on the very first day. I never change out of my sports bra after my morning workout, and I swap my leggings only for sweatpants. I have 3 t-shirts I don, and 1 very large and soft fleece pull over for the chillier days.I haven't worn makeup and I only wash my hair twice a week. In addition to being greasy, my hair, growing out from a pixie, reacts to the humidity by taking on a life of its own. I let it air dry each evening and wake up to it curling every which way, standing straight up and out.

I wander around the house each day carrying a cup of coffee, my lap top and my phone. I snack between video calls and unconsciously wipe my hands on my chest or pass them through my hair, leaving little bits of chips or Cheetos sticking to the fleece or clinging to my unruly ringlets.

I occasionally get looks of amusement and snickers from my family when I wander past them looking like I rubbed my hair on a static-laden towel or rolled on the dog bed. They are used to my home uniform from our pre-COVID evening and weekends, and were regular witnesses to my nearly superhero-fashion, 5 o'clock switches from pencil skirts and pumps to pajamas.

Being able to work from home during a pandemic is a privilege and I'm grateful to my employer for allowing me to do so. For most of us, working from home does not resemble working in our offices at all. I don't look at two screens all day while working from my standing desk. I don't have a lovely table for welcoming others in for conversation. I can't ask a co-worker to take a walking meeting, across campus, to Starbucks. Instead, I stand in my laundry room. where I place my laptop on a box of old photos and talk about budget cuts while my drying sweatpants hang behind me. I welcome no one to my non existent table for conversation. Instead, I sit hunched over on my bed, instant messaging people from work, while two children yell, bounce balls and talk at me about YouTube videos. I drink coffee but it's just not the same as going to Starbucks and then running late to my next meeting because I was chatting with the barista, or a student, or a professor.

Early in the pandemic, in the opinion piece "Instructors, Please Wash Your Hair"in Inside Higher Ed, Kristie Kiser suggested that we owe it to our students to model good behavior and teach them respect by continuing to wear professional clothing while working from home. Thankfully, Laken Brooks clapped back with the response article, "To the Instructors Who Can't Wash Their Hair" arguing that, "female instructors can, in fact, use this time to question the academy’s patriarchal beauty expectations that many of us may have taken for granted."

Yes! F-U-C-K the patriarchy! This is COVID not Cover Girl, people!

At first, my colleagues were not accustomed to seeing me in my natural habitat, with my natural hair, thinning eyebrows, and queen mattress-sized clothing, but almost everyone was dressed pretty casual Friday, even on the other four business days of the week. No one has mentioned to me that they are distracted by my lioness hair or feel that I'm not working hard while wearing 3 sizes too big sweatpants. After 14 weeks, like they once did on campus, they are, again, used to seeing my face everyday, only now it is on a screen.

I, however, am so sick of seeing myself on the screen. Fixing my hair and putting on makeup isn't' going to help. No amount of lighting or lipstick is going to change my mind. I can not stand seeing my face on that little screen every day and while I try my hardest not to look at myself, I can't help it. Shira Feder's article on Insider.com (with a super long title), explains the imaginary audience phenomenon and how we feel that others are scrutinizing us even more in the virtual realm. Of course, Feder suggests, everyone is likely looking at themselves, too, and not you, so there is no need to stress about it. This is helpful to read but also not at all. Every time I join a call, or wait for the host to let me in from the lobby, I brace myself, and there I am. My face and neck are losing collagen and my skin is sagging. I talk out of one side of my mouth, which is encircled by wrinkles. My nose is all the things: not symmetrical, too large for my face, with nostrils large enough to store a pair of scooters. After my nose, my forehead takes up most of my face, followed closely by my glasses. I'm basically a forehead, a nose with glasses, and some jowls.

Seven to eight video calls a day.

Five days a week.

Fourteen weeks.

Five hundred and sixty times staring at my own jowls.

Forget about being trapped with my family! I'm trapped staring at my face all day!

I am excited if I am in a big meeting, because it means I can turn off my video and just listen. I will only turn it on if I need to speak. I'm secretly happy on the days when my service stinks and I am forced to turn off the video in order to improve the audio quality. Like the other day, when I had a meeting with my boss. I had 30 minutes with her, and she is a very busy woman so I always have to be clear, concise and get to the point. As I rapid-fire asked her questions, she had to interrupt me because I was freezing. I turned off the camera but she then told me it was too hard to stare at the black box that represented my face. I turned it on but we were again interrupted because she said her screens were going crazy. She was in the was in her office on campus that day, and she has two monitors and a laptop docking station. I really wanted to get some answers from her, but apparently the crazy screens were too much of a distraction for her as she claimed my face was taking up all three of them. Having no idea what she meant, I asked her to send me a photo and then what showed up moments later was my worst video call nightmare. Like some sort of installation art gone wrong, one of her large monitors displayed just one eye. The other screen displayed the other eye and her laptop. docked below the screens, displayed my mouth and signature jowls. My nose was displayed prominently on all three. It was like being at Best Buy and staring at the big wall of TVs and they are all playing the same show, except the show is your face and your face looks like a Rubik's Cube. And Shira Feder may be correct that, most of the time, those we video chat with are not even looking at us, this was not one of those times.

My boss is great and, out of all the people to see my face looking like a bad puzzle, I'm glad it was her. It made us both laugh pretty hard and, in the middle of all of this chaos and uncertainty, it felt pretty good to laugh.

(Want to see the photo? It is the cover art to this post and can be seen by clicking into the actual essay section of the website. Or you may have seen it in your social media feed when clicking to read the essay.)