Lip-reading is something that doesn’t get talked about very often, because much like the disability it partners with, lip-reading is invisible. In its most elementary form: it could be described as learning how words look when formed by someone’s mouth. In its most intricate form: it’s a lifeline to communication.

But lip-reading so much more than that. It’s an ability to communicate with others when one of your five senses is critically damaged (or completely absent). Although it can be taught, a craft finely honed and practiced, lip-reading is most often learned organically. In the brain’s frantic attempt to match sound and context, the rapid absorption of visual cues is born. Not only visual cues from lip movement, but of facial signals and expressions and environmental indicators, all paired up with sound that is muddled, distorted, missing cadence and usually indecipherable. The brain that tries to make sense of this, at warp speed, before the next word comes.

But most of the world doesn’t exist in the best case scenario: a quiet room with one-on-one interaction. Let’s turn one person speaking into a group conversation with back-and-forth speech. Not only does this add in extra words but also the need to visually track. A lip-reader must fly back and forth between everyone’s face, also anticipating who will speak next.

Then, put these people in an environment with background noise, where the sounds and the words that were already a dull cacophony become swirled and hidden amongst distant conversations and laughter, the hum of air conditioners, traffic, or nearby construction. Add in a dog barking or someone mowing their lawn down the street. Put these people in a crowded restaurant or a car going sixty miles an hour…and the lip-reading challenge levels up in complexity.

Take all of that. Then, add in people who mumble. People who don’t enunciate words. People with soft voices and people whose mouths don’t really move a lot when they talk. Give them facial hair and weird quirks like chewing on their lips. Place them in front of a sunny window at a restaurant and watch them become backlit, a grayish shadow cast over their face, adding even more visual intricacy. Give them the mannerisms that seem to be normal to so many service workers and medical professionals by having them turn away from you while the speak, so you can only see one side of their mouth and the way that their jaw moves, and that’s what you have to work with.

And then, make this every situation, every day, all the time. That’s lip-reading. It’s not some magical superpower that allows you to eavesdrop on people’s conversations or understand what your friends are saying to you at a concert where no one can hear anyone. It is an exhausting, labor-intensive level of mental work that gives you a small percentage of the information that hearing people receive without any effort whatsoever. That is lip-reading.

Lip-reading is subconsciously strenuous enough on its own, no matter how controlled or conducive the environment may be. Much in the way a marathon runner’s physical body, however well trained, will break down and need to rest and recover, so do the mental facilities of a lip-reader, on a daily basis. Mental fatigue, mental fog, and the ever-present frustration that even with all that work, so much is still missed.

Lip-reading is still a skill though. And it’s still something that, fatiguing though it may be, allows people who cannot hear an opportunity to do what we, as humans, crave and need to most: communicate and connect.

Now, take that away.

Throw in a pandemic, cover everyone’s faces everywhere. Take away the one thing that’s been crafted and perfected—lip-reading—and make it literally impossible. Not more difficult, not tougher, not requiring extra effort. Impossible.

I remember how devastating this felt in the beginning of the pandemic, when we were all so naïve and innocent. I remember the quandary of giving up my pool membership—a staple of my children’s summers—even as coronavirus cases took a breather. This decision was not because of COVID-19 concerns. It wasn’t how safe is this, how well will they enforce social distancing, is it worth it if we only go a few times? Paradoxically, it was because of how the pool was handling COVID-19. It was because of their masking policy—the very thing that was allowing us to resume some semblance of normal life.

How on earth was I going to navigate two kids in a pool (which in my mind is a big vat of potential death, even though they can swim) if masks were required? How was I going to join my friends in going to the patio for lunch if all the servers were masked? How was I even going to sign in, when the kid at the gate who would be asking me questions, was masked? What was I going to do when all the acquaintances and pool friends I’ve come to know and love wanted to come talk to me: with a mask from six feet away? The easier thing to do was to cancel my pool membership. It would just be one year, I told myself. My children would certainly survive and the bonus: one less place to worry about Covid.

But similar situations kept happening. Every day. The bank tellers, already on a screen that couldn’t be seen well in the sunlight of the drive-up, were now wearing masks. The twelve-year old check out girl at Wegman’s who carded me while I tried to purchase wine. Despite telling her I needed to her to write down whatever she was saying, she kept repeating herself and then, in the manner of a future Karen, angrily ripped off a piece of register tape to write down that she needed to see my identification, as if the lines on my face weren’t evidence enough that I was well over the legal drinking age. Behind me in line, everyone stared at me—their masked faces unable to hide the pity and irritation in their eyes.

The pediatrician visit where the staff laughed and giggled at how weird they looked in the clear shields that I had to jump through hoops to get provided just so that I could understand the doctor treating my child. The irony of that brief window of time when I could read lips, to watch them mocking the very thing that was a lifeline for me.

The car dealership where I approved a significant amount of costly “maintenance” work because it was less effort than asking the girl, for the tenth time, to write it down for me.

The orthodontist, where we are frequent flyers, who need to be reminded every single time that I need them to wear the clear masks. The ever so subtle hint of annoyance at having to scramble around, looking for a mask or a shield, just to tell me that my son’s mouth is looking good. The struggle between, just wait in the car and let your son tell you and don’t I deserve the same reassurance and treatment as every other parent who is shelling out gobs of money for a smile?

The friends, the ones who know, and still walk up to me in the grocery store and start talking as if I am suddenly going to magically be able to know what’s being said.

As the pandemic wore on, into the fall and the winter, it became increasingly obvious that masks were going to be more of a long-term challenge. That even when society, bolstered by vaccines, opens back up, it will still be masked. That the anticipation of returning to school events and sporting events—which will be celebrated by many—creates nothing but a feeling of panic and sadness. There was a time when I adored group gatherings, even being a lip-reader, even knowing there were bound to be conversations I missed parts of, even knowing how exhausted I would be. I love people and I love communicating. Now, I avert my eyes so as not to incite even a meaningless conversation that will undoubtedly be one-sided.

With this comes a crushing realization of how difficult—no, impossible—the world is going to be for me to navigate in the coming years. There’s the underlying fear of an already anxious person, of a single mom who juggles many balls. There is the fear of emergencies…how do I communicate with a paramedic? How would I navigate one of my kids getting sick or needing to go to the hospital? What would happen if I was admitted to a hospital, in a time when no one else is allowed to accompany you? How would I communicate at all? What if my car breaks down and I need Triple A to rescue me? What are my choices? The what ifs grow daily.

Someone said to me this summer, in an unknowingly flippant way: I know you don’t like the masks, but we need to be wearing them for the greater good. As if I were a petulant child refusing to wear pants. As if I didn’t understand that masks are an integral part of slowing down a pandemic, of flattening the curve, of keeping people alive. As if my complaining and downright hatred of masks had to do with a simpleton reason of not wanting to be told what to do. Instead of having to do with the real reason: that my ability to communicate, dependent on a mentally taxing but sufficient and long-developed skill, has been completely taken away from me.

I tried to explain it in analogical terms. I tried to compare it people with wheelchairs—imagine that one day, they woke up and all the ramps and doors that make the world accessible for them are gone. And they’re told sorry, but the greater good is more important here, you’ll just have to deal with it. But even that is not a good example, because that would never happen. Because physical disabilities are visible and obvious. Because they wouldn’t have to ask, sometimes repeatedly, for people to write things down or to use a clear mask and shield. Because they wouldn’t sit in the waiting room of their lifelong pediatrician and watch receptionists laughing and taking selfies with the clear shields, the very accommodation that they had to bend over backwards just to have access to.

Because the death of lip-reading is like everything else that is characteristic to hearing loss and deafness…its invisible, unknown. It isn’t obvious, and it doesn’t make people uncomfortable or empathetic or whatever emotion drives them to run over and help someone struggling in a wheelchair or navigating with a cane.

I explained it to a friend the other day, putting it this way: in this time of isolation, where everything is canceled and people are languishing at home, even simple interactions are meaningful. A chat with the gas station clerk, the post office lady, the acquaintance you run into in Aisle 6 of the store. These are little but meaningful connections. Someone noticing your lock screen is a picture of your dog and commenting that they, too, have a black lab. A parent of one of your kids’ classmates, asking how they are doing with virtual learning. The bank teller commenting on the weather. A stranger complimenting your purse. All those conversations are lost.

These little, tiny human connections are gone. On top of the big things being impossible, on top of living in a world where semi-isolation has become the norm, where the conversations that were easy—sitting together, close, in quiet environments—are virtually non-existent. Where the socialization factor of life is horribly limited, anyhow.

It has become so very apparent: the point this pandemic has driven home, again and again. Human beings are not meant to be separate from one another. Our society is not meant to function this way. Communication and connection are the underlying threads that everything is built on. But as we work towards a return to some “new normal” that will be nothing like our old normal, the very thing that is allowing this to happen—masks—is the very thing that is making life impossible for me.