Imagine you’re an elderly rehab patient, maybe trying to recover mobility after a stroke, and receiving treatment in a long-term care facility.
Your therapist is a ferocious taskmaster, constantly exhorting you to do more, pushing you to your limits and beyond. His strategy works, and you finish the session strong, stepping away from the OmniCycle exhausted but proud. You make solid eye contact with your torturer, non-verbally pleading with him to bestow some hard-earned praise and affirmation.
“I think you did fine.”
It’s all he says. Nothing to acknowledge your effort or build you up. Nothing to motivate you for future sessions. So you’re crushed, despondent, wondering why you even tried. You wheel yourself back to bed and stay there for years, refusing to ever enter life or the rehab gym again.
That’s precisely how I felt earlier this week, on the morning of my return to the office after shaving off my beard.
I’d been growing it since the start of the pandemic, embracing a fierce, wilderness look to show a hardy resolve in the face of impending global disaster. Even now, when you stare at my McKnight’s author “photo” above, can’t you just see the rugged but kindly resilience written all over my face? For the past four years, I’ve looked like a weather-beaten 18th century ship captain, or a cross between NFL coach Andy Reid and Canadian author Farley Mowat, all worthy role models.
But eventually, for a variety of reasons, it just felt like it was time. So I fired up the Weedwacker in the garage and attacked the situation, first clearing the dense underbrush, then smoothing the stubble and turning my face back into the pasty, barren landscape of my pre-Covid era. It was a long, difficult and painful task, and in the afterglow of the grueling achievement, I never once paused to consider how the new look would be received by my coworkers.
In a word, poorly.
The first person to notice and comment was an intern who we’ll call Jessica (not her real name, which is Hadley). Previously, she had seemed nothing but bright, funny, articulate and kind — a spell that was quickly broken. For a young and aspiring long-term care colleague who might be looking for a job recommendation someday, I expected compassion and support. Instead, with unblinking eyes filled with barely-concealed distaste, she blurted out her cold-hearted assessment.
“I think you look… fine.”
That’s all she said. But unlike our underpraising therapist above, Jessica added a peculiar pause before spitting out the word “fine,” giving it more than just a hint of derision and disapproval. It was passive-aggressively demeaning, kind of like then-Senator Obama’s “You’re likable enough, Hillary” moment in their 2008 primary debate. You wouldn’t like that sort of damning-with-faint-praise comment from your rehab professional, and I didn’t appreciate it from her. Not one bit.
Others were less openly negative, but still not particularly encouraging. One said I looked younger, but didn’t seem to mean it as a compliment. Another said I looked less dignified, though he hoped I wouldn’t take that in a bad way.
“I was scared when I saw you,” added a third. “It was kind of jarring. Like one of those YouTube videos where the dad shaves his beard and the baby cries.”
Many recoiled in obvious terror, or averted their eyes while passing me in the hall. My CEO just pointed at me like an ornithologist spotting an ivory-billed woodpecker, then had a good long laugh at my expense. And just moments ago, another co-worker appeared in my doorway, stared at me sadly, and simply said, “I heard something happened with your face.”
Their responses, however, were probably kinder than my own as I gaze each morning with distress at my suddenly bare face in all its freshly-revealed glory. For a shy person, I now feel far too open and vulnerable, and am realizing I’ve probably made a horrible mistake. The beard covered my flaws, like bark mulch for the face, and I don’t like seeing my multiple chins flap naked in the breeze, like this adorable dog’s jowls.
So even without a motivating pandemic, I guess I’ll just have to start growing it all over again.
The beard is dead. Long live the beard.
Things I Think is written by Gary Tetz, a two-time national Silver Medalist and three-time regional Gold and Silver Medal winner in the Association of Business Press Editors (ASBPE) awards program, as well as an Award of Excellence honoree in the APEX Awards. He’s been amusing, inspiring, informing and sometimes befuddling long-term care readers since the end of a previous century. He is a writer and video producer for Consonus Healthcare in Portland, OR.
The opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News guest submissions are the author’s and are not necessarily those of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News or its editors.
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