In elementary school, they’d let us dress up in costumes every year for Halloween. It was easily one of the most exciting days of the school year.

But throughout elementary school, I’d get dressed up on the designated day, and secretly feel like a nervous wreck. I kept worrying that I had somehow got dressed up on the wrong day and I’d be laughed out of school for being dressed like a pirate or whatever.

It wouldn’t be until I got to school and saw the hordes of fellow ankle-biters, who also were dressed for Halloween, that I’d feel a sense of intense relief.

It wasn’t just me, it really was Halloween.

I’ve found that, as of recently, I’ve had those same feelings every time I go to the store.

I have a face mask that I leave hanging on the gearshift of my car above a box of tissues with a bottle of hand sanitizer in it. Before I leave my car to get groceries for the next couple of days, I take a hit of hand sanitizer, clean my hands, put on my mask and stare at myself in the rearview mirror to get out of the car and into the store.

I can’t help but feel so ridiculous every time I put that mask on.

It has nothing to do with the material, the shape, or anything else dealing with the aesthetics of the mask. It’s the mask itself and everything it represents.

The idea of going to the grocery store wearing a mask, purposefully keeping my distance from people, and regularly not finding everything I intended to buy seem so foreign from the grocery shopping experience I’ve grown accustomed to in America.

So foreign that, for a second, it almost feels like I’m imagining everything and there’s no real pandemic and it’s all something I somehow imagined on my drive there.

For whatever stupid reason, I sit there and have to purposefully tell myself that the pandemic is real and that I need to do my part to help protect myself, my family and others as best as I can.

Nonetheless, I can’t help but worry if I’m going to be the only person wearing a mask in the grocery store.

It’s dumb, I know. But I think ultimately every adult is simply a kid who has just buried their childhood selves under a bunch of adultlike habits and mannerisms.

I don’t like sticking out in a crowd any more than I like going up a flight of stairs in the dark.

That’s how the monsters grab you by the ankles after all.

But I overcome that immature moment of self-consciousness, get out of the car with my mask and get groceries for the next several days.

I’ll usually see several other people wearing masks within a couple of minutes of going into the store and can’t help but let out a sigh of relief that I’m not alone. People can’t tell that I sighed, though, since my glasses are already fogged up from the huffing and puffing I’m doing to breathe behind that mask in the first place.

The point is, when I see someone else in a mask, I stop worrying about looking like an idiot and start worrying about more important stuff such as getting food for my kids and not touching my face.

I think all of this is perfectly natural. Not the pandemic, but the worry that you’re going to stick out for doing something weird or strange.

People don’t like things that are different. We often resist change and treat people who look or act differently from us as if they’re zombies, meaning that we treat them as if they’re almost human, but not quite.

And for once in most of our lives, all of us are in a situation where we all have to act and do things in a way that’s so different from the way that we’ve done them before that it makes sense that we’d want to reject the idea that they’re happening in the first place.

But they are happening whether we opt for a mask or not. They’re happening whether we accept the expert opinion or not.

We can reject the fact that we’ve been averaging one 9/11 a day in deaths countrywide due to COVID-19 and the only thing that seems to slow down the spread is the health measures we’ve put into place, or we can blame the lack of normalcy on people overreacting.

It’s always easier to blame people because you can control people, mainly politicians, if you’re loud enough.

Viruses don’t care about approval numbers or the GDP.

When I was a kid, I was always afraid I was going to school with a mask on the wrong day, and now that I’m an adult, I’m always a little afraid that I’m going to the store with a mask when I don’t need to.

But in both cases, wearing a mask was the right choice.

Hopefully, us Utahns can continue making those right choices that have helped us to flatten the curve and our government can help give a hand up to businesses and individuals that are struggling instead of hoarding hundreds of thousands of dollars in antimalarials that have produced sketchy results at best.

Because it may feel ridiculous at the moment, but it’s the right time to do it.