Thinking about how incredibly challenging I’ve found travel for work this past year and a half - I’ve always found flying hard and draining but it is much moreso lately - and I think a huge amount of it comes down to covid? Covid is just generally kind of an ever-present existential threat nowadays but it feels dramatically more pronounced when travelling due to how many more people you’re exposed to when travelling, the variety of places they come from and the length of time you’re exposed, and on top of this most of the travelling is to the US where covid seems more prevalent than ever….
This makes airports and US convention centres feel like the two actual worst, most dangerous places to be in as a baseline which already makes travel way harder than it ever used to be. On top of this though there’s a lot of complications surrounding masking. I find wearing good quality highly effective masks to be a sensory nightmare even for a handful of minutes let alone 16 hours of travel; they’re scratchy, they’re far too warm, they apply unpleasant pressure on my face/ears/nose, and they’re just generally Very Overwhelming, whilst also causing constant anxiety about whether they’re actually sealed well enough. But because airports are basically The Most Dangerous Places on Earth I feel both personal responsibility for my health, and moral responsibility on top of that, to wear one, so a journey that would normally be very-draining-but-loosely-manageable becomes nearly-unbearable.
Similarly I struggle a lot more with being in a convention environment at the moment for basically the same reasons, I’m fairly sure this leads to me competing worse and so doing worse at my job, but I’m also scared that if I don’t mask in that environment I would be endangering myself, endangering my loved ones and being a Bad Person. I also have just so much background anxiety in those environments too regarding how people who are or aren’t masked are judging me regarding however I happen to be presenting.
I got round some of these issues at one point by wearing a cloth mask with a replaceable filter inside of it which I find much less physically uncomfortable in all the aforementioned ways and so less distressing on a sensory level. I recognise cloth masks even with filters are a lot less safe than N95s though so wearing one makes me anxious both that unmasked people will accuse me of being a poser (something that has happened before) and that masked queer people will see me as not trying hard enough/not being safe enough.
I have no idea how to navigate any of this.