The Fundamentals of an Air Hug: Lessons From the Pandemic 2020
An air hug is a very simple concept that holds a significant meaning. When the pandemic started, I couldn’t have begun to imagine where it would go. I never would have predicted the quarantining, lockdowns, and zoom classes. The simple things that had become habits were ripped away: smiling when passing someone in the hall, whispering to friends in class, carpooling, and sleepovers, all quickly torn from our lives, which left me disoriented.
Every day, I woke up, I dressed and I went to school. I either entered a room in which the 4 walls were constructed by 4 black lines on my screen, or I walked into the skeleton of my school that stood eerily quiet. None of this was connecting. Masks, social distancing, and zoom. None of these foster connection, but it was life. As human beings, we craved to touch each other, to comfort each other, to just be there for each other, but during an extremely difficult and life-changing experience, we couldn’t do any of that. We couldn’t hug or hold hands, we couldn’t support our friends as they cried into our arms.
The first step in an air hug is to open your arms widely and reach out with your fingertips. As weeks turned to months, I had to accept the awful truth of this pandemic, I couldn’t continue to hope it would suddenly end and everything would go back to normal. Our lives had been changed forever. If before the pandemic, someone asked me how I would stay connected to my friends if I couldn’t see them in person, my instant response would have been social media, a platform literally designed to connect people across the world. However, my conversations and friendships through social media became extremely artificial. I was struggling and hurting along with everyone else but still, in my snaps I smiled, and in my Instagram posts, I was laughing. My friends no longer knew what was weighing on my shoulders and breaking my heart.
The next step of the air hug is to bring your arms across your body, embracing yourself. Although it was difficult to do at first, I knew how important reaching out to my friends was. The bond that we had was freeing. We could be whoever we were without judgment. We could share our hardest stories or our most meaningful experiences and would only receive support and appreciation. I found parts of myself I had forgotten in their laughs, stories, and comfort. Though hanging out had strict regulations, our weekly parking lot conversations and random group texts brought us together.
The ironic thing about an air hug is that it’s a way to express love to others, but in every way, it’s loving yourself. When done properly it creates a circle with your upper body and arms. A ring of support, warmth, and love circulating around and around but always returning back to your own heart. Although we rarely see each other and are distanced, these singular rings create a chain, a chain of humans connected by our shared experience of being human. At the beginning of the pandemic, I thought I was alone, but I soon realized the amazing community I had. More than ever the rings in our chains were being broken and removed, but instead of falling apart, we relinked and pulled each other closer — holding space in Zoom meetings and TV programs. Likewise, my friends and I came together and figured out ways to connect when we couldn’t in the ways we had before.
An air hug is such a simple idea but holds so much power in a life when we can not touch.
