Recently, I woke up with a sore throat after attending three contra dances in one week. I learned that a bunch of contra people had woken up with sore throats and were testing positive for COVID. "It's finally happened," I thought, "I've caught COVID." My symptoms were mild, nothing unusual I wouldn't catch from a common cold, and I found that I had felt an enormous sense of relief. I tested negative on my first rapid test, but we all know you have to test on the third day as well before you know if it's COVID or not. That night, I slept better than I've ever slept in recent memory. I woke up feeling refreshed and awake for the first time in years. It seemed so strange, to have slept so well when I had COVID. I tested again on day two, still negative, but I took the day off work to avoid spreading it. A telemed urgent care doctor told me it's "probably COVID" and that "COVID isn't what it used to be and it's not worth it to even keep testing." He gave me two days off work. The next day, I tested again, and once again my test was negative. I felt oddly disappointed, is it really not COVID? I took another test, this time swabbing my throat and cheeks, and that was negative too. Seven years since COVID-19 was identified in Wuhan and I still haven't caught it. That should be a good thing, so why was it so frustrating?
I noticed a funny confluence of sevens in my life recently. I lived in Central Massachusetts for seven years, then moved to Western Massachusetts where I lived for seven years. Seven years ago, I moved to Philadelphia, seven months before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic and the world locked down.
Seven years ago I was so young. I had so much energy. I organized a weekly mostly-trans mostly-leftist shabbat dinner potluck that viewed itself as a radical project of family abolition. I was an internet micro-celebrity with thousands of Twitter followers. I wrote poetry about violent Marxist-Leninist revolution in our lifetimes and was invited to read it at Anarchist book stores. I was still only a grad student; I had not yet earned the title of "librarian." I had two boyfriends and only slept in my own bed three nights a week. I used ze/hir pronouns. Life was so awesome, back then. Young, living in a new city, making new friends every day, deeply enmeshed in a dense community of trans Jews in a world full of life. My health had been improving dramatically. I went from using a cane to easily walking several miles unassisted. It may have been the best life had ever felt, for me. The pandemic took it all away and it has never really come back.
I am far less active on the internet these days, and especially I stay away from posting on social media in any way that could lead to me becoming popular or a celebrity. It still happens, with some frequency, that I meet some trans person and say my name is "Shel" and they immediately clock me as Shel from Cohost. Shel from Mastodon. Shel from Twitter. Shel who wrote the Dandelion Tinctures story. Shel who found a vulva shrine in her basement. Shel who wrote the Lashon Hara thread. Jess From Online's Sister. Recently, lurking on tumblr, a screenshot of my tweets from 2019 appeared on my dashboard: it was the thread of jokes about sexual taxonomy.
With the exception of Cohost, everything people recognize me for happened roughly seven years ago. They all happened before the pandemic, and before my brain injury. I do not want to be an internet micro-celebrity again, that is a curse I would only wish on people I deeply dislike, but I do often feel I am living in the shadow of my former self. Rather, I am living in the shadow of the life the pandemic took from me.
From Greenfield with Love
I have now lived in Philly for as long as I lived in Western Massachusetts. I was in love with Western Massachusetts the whole seven years I lived there. I was in love with Philly for those first seven months. There is a lot to like about Philly, most importantly that I can actually afford to live here, that there are jobs here, and that I do not need to own a car.
But, I associate Philly entirely with pandemic living. In Massachusetts, there was no pandemic. In Massachusetts, there was no brain damage. Things were far from perfect—I was relatively poor the entire time I lived there—but it did not feel apocalyptic. Everything was green, vibrant, and whimsical. I never thought about germs or catching viruses. It was something that just happened or it didn't. Everything bad that was happening in the world was happening "over there." The liberal progressive Commonwealth shielded me from things like fascism and forest fires.
I visited Western Mass again for a week recently, excited to visit all my old haunts, and do all my favorite local activities. In my mind, it would be just like when I left. Instead, I found that everyone was keeping COVID precautions. I was confused. COVID is a thing I have to worry about in Philadelphia. I keep COVID precautions in Philly because that's where the pandemic happened. I can't risk catching COVID, it's dangerous! Well, of course, the world kept turning in Western Massachusetts after I moved away. It was not 2016, but 2026. The pandemic hit Hampshire County too. Many businesses and community spaces that had been local institutions were gone now, and new spaces were local institutions that I had never heard of.
I was shopping for souvenirs for my coworkers at the Cedar Chest in Thornes, a mini-mall of sorts in Northampton. I picked up a postcard showing a map of Massachusetts, and was confused to find that the labels were inaccurate. Worcester was marked as being not at "the Heart of the Commonwealth," but around where Old Sturbridge Village is. Greenfield was where Northampton should be, and Northampton where Springfield should be. Then, I saw that "Somerville" seemed to be spelled "Somewllle." It dawned on me that what I was looking at was an AI-generated postcard.
Looking around, I realized the entire shop was full of AI-generated tschotchkes. AI?! In my small Western Massachusetts city? I realized, walking around, that downtown Northampton was covered in AI-generated signs, posters, and menus. The future had come to my home. My friends avoided eating in restaurants because of COVID, AI had infected downtown, and the economy was wrecked. Housing in WeMA is now more expensive than Philadelphia, but there are even fewer jobs available. Old classmates from library school were now farm-hands because they couldn't find library jobs. Friends from college were still working multiple part-time jobs to make ends meet. The only local friends who seemed to be middle-class were the ones who had moved away and come back.
Pulaski Park, in my memory a newly renovated park full of impromptu folk music concerts and Morris dancers, was now "associated with the economically downtrodden" as one local friend put it. The vibe was that it's seen akin to how Philadelphians see McPherson Square Park in Kensington. They don't personally feel comfortable visiting it. "Not because there's anything wrong with it being full of poor people using drugs, that's totally fine. It's just like, not my space to be in, you know? Like I'm intruding on their important community space." The opiate epidemic and homelessness problems had worsened due to rising cost of living. Entire towns were actively beseeching young people to move in, having been depopulated by COVID taking their elders. COVID had devastated the region in many ways, and it was clear that the community was still rebuilding from the rubble.
2026 had the lowest COVID rates since 2021, and at times this summer our COVID rates were even lower than 2021's famous "hot vaxx summer." I was already taking a few more risks than I'd have taken in years past, and in Massachusetts, I felt even less of a need. It was rural, and rarely was I in a crowded place the way I might be in Philly. The educational attainment level is high, so surely everyone was getting that new annual vaccine dose. Most importantly, it's just where I lived before I ever had to think about COVID. I felt safe in a way I don't in Philly. I found myself walking into the bagel shop or the post office without remembering to put my mask on, and not caring when I realized I was unmasked. I even rode the bus unmasked at one point (just the once, there were only three other people on the bus, and two of them were my parents).
Still, I did end up masking pretty often, simply because my friends were masking. I masked in shops, on the bus, at shul, and attempted to mask while contra dancing (I gave up partway through). Local friends told me about this drama happening at a new lesbian bar in Greenfield, and this was before the Globe picked it up, and I just felt particularly anti-mask in that moment. Why would you have a masked bar in Western Massachusetts? There's no pandemic here, right? This is the good place where I feel safe. Is there even a single COVID case in Franklin County right now? More people live in my neighborhood than in Greenfield. I found myself making the same anti-mask mandate arguments that anti-maskers at Kol Tzedek had made in 2024.
My friends—who have actually been living in Western Massachusetts since I left—felt differently. Many people in the community have developed Long COVID, including one of my oldest and dearest friends, who now uses a wheelchair. It's a rural area, so access to special Long COVID care is more difficult to access. Everyone is poorer, so the costs of catching COVID are higher. The communities are smaller and tighter, so viruses spread quicker through social webs. I had become an ignorant snobbish privileged city folk come from away seeing my old home through idyllic autumnal-colored glasses. Had I become a leaf-peeper? I shuddered, and heeded the guidance of my friends.
The Color of Caution
Upon returning to Philly, that unease with being unmasked in public immediately returned. The bus was crowded and full of people coughing—and someone tried to start a fight with me because I didn't say "excuse me" loud enough after bumping into them. Through my office window on my first day back at work, I saw a man masturbating behind a dumpster. I think it's typical of middle-class white people like me to feel a reflexive disgust at poverty—to be unconsciously afraid of catching a disease from someone who is homeless. (I don't think anyone likes seeing a stranger masturbate behind a dumpster, to be honest.)
Yes, Philly is where the pandemic happened, but I also am confronted daily by poverty—urban racialized poverty. "Inner city" poverty. Black poverty.
The poverty in WeMA did not scare me. It was rural white declasse poverty. It was the kind of poverty that was familiar to me, a kind that I myself had personally experienced in the past. Instead of pan-handling, it's venmo-begging. Instead of multi-generational households, it's "collective houses" with far too many roommates to be sanitary. Instead of shelters, sleeping at transit stations, or roughing it under bridges; it's couch-surfing, camping in the woods, or sleeping in a van. Instead of full-service sex work on the street, it's OnlyFans. Instead of shouting at someone that you're going to beat them up for disrespecting you, it's pulling out the harshest leftist buzzwords to frame someone as a Bad Person. Instead of untreated Schizophrenia, it's untreated Borderline Personality Disorder. Philly's poverty is what other people experience. What those people experience. My unconscious biases make it scarier to me, less sympathetic.
I empathize more with the people going through what I personally have been through. I know that the white tenderqueer saying that I'll "get the wall" isn't going to do anything to me. But when a random Black person on the bus says she's going to beat me up, a part of me thinks she might actually do it. It's not entirely irrational to think someone could be serious when they threaten you in-person, especially since I have been present on buses where people have gotten into fights. Still, it's clear that there is a bias here that is not justified.
The mask protects me from COVID, but it also serves as this sort-of superstitious talisman to protect me from the poverty surrounding me. I can't be infected by the poverty if I am not breathing the same air—if nobody can see my face clearly enough to identify facial expressions. It is a barrier that puts me outside the world. I am "not involved in all that."
I am often stared at and given mean looks in Philly; it's pretty much a daily experience. There are many reasons they might do this: I'm trans, I'm fat, I'm autistic, I'm often "out of place" racially and socioeconomically for the neighborhoods I work in—and I wear a mask. In this moment, getting home from MA, I became aware of what I must look like to others. Like a Victorian Lady of the Peerage walking through London wearing riding gloves, boots, a tight jacket, a hat, and holding a parasol she uses to poke things from a distance. She may even hold a handkerchief over her nose to avoid breathing in the miasmas. She is adorned in upper class battle armor to protect her from coal soot and plague. Reflecting on this, I did think of the literal parasol I've started carrying around since July 2025, when I decided carrying my own shade was the only way to make being outdoors bearable in our ever-warming world. I'm not the only person in my neighborhood I've seen take this up recently, both among white and Black residents. We just don't have enough shady trees outside the high-income neighborhoods.
If I were a Victorian Lady in London, when factories still filled the air with coal smoke; and sunscreen and antibiotics had not yet been invented, then I—too—would choose to wear the armor. I wouldn't want to get soot on my hands, get sunburned, nor to catch any diseases. It's just sensible to protect yourself, isn't it? She faces genuine risk to personal health and hygiene if she did not wear her gloves, hat, boots, and parasol. In fact, hats and gloves were typical daily wear for most people in the West until the mid-20th century. Look at any historic fashion videos and you'll see gloves, even for indoor gatherings. Still, what do we think of her, when we see her in the movies? She thinks she's above us all. It's a trope in many pieces of media. One thinks of One Piece, where the aristocratic celestial dragons dress like Astronauts when they descend to the lower world, with their heads encased in bubbles to avoid breathing the same air.
My moral OCD thrives in moments like this. It kind of does come across as racist and classist to wear a mask whenever I'm around poor people of color—even if that is every single day of my life. At the same time, what's more important? Not catching COVID, or being perceived as a bad person by strangers? Not catching COVID is more important. I think what's useful to recognize in this bias is a couple things. From a practical standpoint, if I'm trying to connect across race and class lines in a given context, my mask is very likely an impediment. For instance, if I'm the only white person in a predominantly Black space, and I'm the only one wearing a mask, it doesn't look good. If my goal is to genuinely connect with the people around me, the mask is a big barrier to that goal. I'm not really trying to connect with other people on the bus or the subway; but in a political organizing meeting or at a neighborhood community event? Yes, this does matter. Does it matter more than not catching COVID? I have to decide that for myself in that moment.
The other way the bias is useful to be aware of is when I'm making my risk-assessment decisions, to be conscious of how a space being very white and middle-class might be biasing me towards feeling safer unmasking than I might if it were a Black and working-class space. Do I feel safer unmasking for Contra Dancing than for Line Dancing? The gut answer is yes, I do. That's irrational. In fact, Contra Dancing is certainly riskier than Line Dancing—as Line Dancing doesn't involving touching or coming face-to-face with other dancers. What's different about those activities isn't the likelihood of catching COVID but the cultural associations with the dance form. This isn't being COVID cautious, it's being racist. If I'm not mindful of this unconscious bias, I could put myself in danger by letting my guard down around white people with COVID, or on the inverse, could hinder a connection with another community or individual because I am masking in a setting when I otherwise might think it's safe enough to unmask.
To be clear, I'm not saying only white middle class people mask. I'm saying when white middle class people don't mask, my unconscious racial bias leaves me feeling more like that is OK or safe to be around. This is not rational; it's bias. A moment when one's "gut feeling" must be challenged. Noticing biases like this and working to break those thought patterns is what we call "unlearning internalized racism." But, in this instance, the behaviors I'd ideally take to unlearn the unconscious bias, would be to stop taking COVID precautions in most situations, given that I spend more of my time in impoverished predominantly Black neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods, and more of my time masked than unmasked. Ceasing COVID precautions is not a neutral activity, for my own health nor for the well-being of others.
My OCD loves stuff like this. I've written all that out and it's correct. That is all 100% correct stuff I've said about how race and class affect masking. It's yet another layer of things to consider every single day, every time I pass through a doorway, in a ritualized manner that feeds into my OCD. Counting everyone in the room, calculating the chances someone has COVID based on current levels, looking at the windows and ventilation systems, assessing the likelihood that people in the space are vaccinated or being conscious of COVID exposures, and now looking at everyone's races and doing an unconscious racial bias check. This is awesome. I bet my therapist loves that I'm doing this three hundred times a day.
I'm Sick of Living in a Pandemic
This is hardly a controversial sentiment. None of us like this. Sometimes we might find the positives in masking: keeps your face warm in winter, hides facial expressions, you don't catch the common cold either, etc.—but everything was still better when we could all go enjoy a big meal together in a big room and not think twice about it. I'm starting to realize that my level of COVID anxiety is literally making me sick.
I recently began having some new mysterious medical problems that of course don't show up on tests. Most notably, I've been short of breath. One day it was so severe I checked myself into the emergency room, having looked up on WebMD when shortness breath could be an emergency and finding I'd checked all the boxes. I spent sixteen hours overnight in the emergency room, and every test showed that I'm healthy. My blood oxygen was even fine. When they gave me an inhaler at discharge, I immediately felt better. The recurring shortness of breath has not gone away, and I still don't have an answer. It has made masking far more uncomfortable. Especially if I'm trying to dance or sing, it feels like I'm suffocating if I'm wearing a mask. Every medical professional has brought up the idea that this, and other medical issues, could be somaticized anxiety: "Are you carrying a lot of tension in your body every day?"
I still take more COVID precautions than 98% of people in the world. In addition to my annual vaccine, and washing my hands after entering any building, I always wear a KN95 mask or better every day on public transit, in shops, at work, basically by default in any indoor setting. I am vigilant to the number of people in a room, to people coughing, to the quality of my mask-fit, and to the timing of putting my mask on before the bus comes so as to not hold up the line. If I am unmasked when I normally would mask, perhaps because my mask broke, then I find myself trying to breathe as little as possible.
Recently at shul, I was invited to sit with some potential new friends at oneg and eat bagels, but I felt uncomfortable with how many people were in the room, and went to eat my bagel outside alone instead. I am often isolated from community due to my COVID precautions. Last year, I fell down the stairs, and realized if I'd died, it could have taken weeks for someone to notice my absence and check on me.
All this is true, and yet, I also have found myself in uncomfortable conversations with other COVID cautious people where I seem to be advocating against the COVID cautious position. I see people wearing P99 respirators and roll my eyes. I laughed at the Boston Globe's Last Ditch article and resented Jackie Matellian's critics (later, I'd spend far more time criticizing the Globe to everyone who brought it up to me). I've unmasked at events that I previously never would have unmasked at, and been annoyed when friends remind me how much of a risk I'm taking by doing so. I've been annoyed and pushed back when asked if I can impose a rapid testing mandate on my shabbat dinner last-minute (though I still did agree to do it, and was still happier to have had the people who were able to come because of it.)
The anti-maskers still see me as OCD, paranoid, and conspiratorial for all the precautions I take; and the pro-maskers perhaps see me as risky, in denial, a dissident, a traitor, or someone who is no longer in the category of people they feel safe taking fewer precautions around due to knowledge of my own "lack of" precautions. I feel like one of those "heterodox thinkers breaking from the left" who will slip down a dark path that ends with writing for the Atlantic or the Free Press.
Earlier this summer, I described it as feeling like I'm the only person who is using an umbrella when it's raining, and I'm stuck between sopping wet people with pneumonia who insist anyone who uses an umbrella is mentally ill and should be committed to an asylum; and people who insist if you don't use an umbrella every day then you're a bad person who wants to kill 20% of the global population. After having that conversation, I then left the building and opened an umbrella on a sunny day (my aforementioned parasol.)
Earlier this summer, I caught my first common cold since 2019. I went English Country Dancing, unmasked, and didn't use hand sanitizer between dances. I was alarmed by the experience. I forgot what it's like to have a common cold. I still have never caught COVID, not once in my life, so I've only been sick due to vaccine side effects or bacterial infections. It was just a cold, and it took me a while to get over, but in the end I was fine. I continued to dance unmasked at social dance events, and even joined a local choir where I sing unmasked during rehearsals. These are not low-risk activities, but I continued to drop my COVID precautions for them. After all, COVID was the lowest it had ever really been.
Last Winter, COVID spiked as it usually does, and as usual I isolated myself and had horrible mental health from the loneliness. However, it was the lowest winter spike by far. The only time it had ever been lower was the first winter when we were under pre-vaccine mandated precautions.
From March to September, COVID was low or very low. It was the longest stretch of the lowest rates in history since the mandates were dropped. For seven months I gradually lowered and lowered my COVID precautions. I went dancing and singing; ate in restaurants and sat in cafes; went to parties and even sometimes left the house without a mask in my pocket.
In many ways, I felt I was reconnecting with the world. There has been more color to life, even with other struggles I have been through. People have commented on how I look healthier, even with my new health issues. I was dancing at Porchfest, and a friend asked "Shel, are you musically inclined? I never knew this about you!" and I realized that most of my Philly friends never knew I was a music person, because for seven years I had been abstaining from all hobbies involving music, due to COVID risk. Instead, I focused on low-risk hobbies, like board games.
Music had been a part of my life since as far back as I can remember. One of my earliest memories, and indeed one of the oldest stories about me, is that when I was four or five years old, inspired by American Idol, I would build a "stage" by stacking pillows, and stand on my "stage" and cry out "it's Attention Time!" and then I would sing songs like I was on American Idol. My "what do you want to be when you grow up" answer was always "a singer." I was enrolled in children's musical theater programs starting on my sixth birthday, and did musical theater every year until I was 15 years old, when I opted to take writing classes instead. In college, I joined the choir, got into Contra dancing, took a social dance sampler class, went to blues-fusion dance parties, went to Shapenote singing events, collected protest songs, wrote original songs, and was a frequent attendee of DIY concerts. After college, I became a Jewish song leader, collecting songs to teach at shabbat dinners or other gatherings.
For seven years, I had lost the music, because masking makes it difficult to sing and dance. Because singing and dancing are among the highest risk activities for COVID transmission. With 2026's unusually low COVID levels, I had been able to reconnect with music, and it has been so healing for me.
Yet now, COVID levels are rising again, rapidly. In Philly, levels have been rising exponentially: doubling week over week. As I write this, PMC19 estimates over 5% of Philadelphians have COVID-19. In previous years, COVID levels drop in October after the Summer spike and before the Holiday spike. This year, we did not have a Summer spike, so our Autumn spike is likely to lead straight into the Holidays.
Recently, many people in my local Contra dancing community went down to DC for an event called Contrastock, and many of them got sick. I assumed it must have been COVID. I was not the only person opting to mask the following week while dancing—and a conspicuous number of people were absent. It was tiring, and I didn't like it, but it was clear I would be taking a huge risk by unmasking. I should try to get used to it, shouldn't I? If I want to keep dancing through the winter, then I should mask while doing it—even if it feels like I'm suffocating. The next week, the sick dancers were back dancing again, unmasked. I checked in, asking if they were feeling well, and was informed none of them had caught COVID after all. Multiple tests all came back negative. The disease they caught at Contrastock was the common cold, and they all feel right as rain.
And then, that Sunday, I woke up with a sore throat, and someone at the dance was testing positive for COVID, and I thought, surely, finally, I have caught COVID. But five tests later, it's not COVID. It's the Contrastock Cold. I got sick and didn't even get to go to Contrastock. I ordered a variety of different masks online to experiment until I find a mask that I can tolerate dancing in. This is my warning shot, and I should start masking at Contra dances before I actually catch COVID. The typical local contra dance has sixty to eighty attendees. That was justifiable this summer, but it's not anymore.
I don't want to go back. COVID levels have risen such that my magic number says it's time for me to be extra cautious again, that I should mask in any room with more than four people in it, but I am struggling to make myself do it. I've tasted freedom. I've remembered what life used to be like. I'm in my 30s now and I don't want to spend the rest of my life taking COVID precautions and missing out on all the connections and community activities I have been avoiding. I am sick of feeling so deeply isolated. The lack of exercise from not dancing, the hyper-vigilance, and the lack of social support from isolation, brings with them other kinds of sickness. There many ways to be healthy or unhealthy and COVID is not the only factor that matters.
When I've asked friends who stopped taking precautions why they made that choice, the answer has generally been something along the lines of: I know I could die if I catch COVID, but I would rather die than keep living a COVID cautious life. I think this is likely a very common sentiment, and what motivates most previously pro-precaution people to view the world through a prism that shows a post-COVID world. I am starting to empathize with it.
We are approaching seven years since the Purim party where I got exposed to this novel coronavirus and had to quarantine for two weeks, only for lockdowns to be declared before our quarantine was set to end. I still have never caught COVID, despite many exposures. I am living my life driven by the fear of catching a virus I've yet to catch due to an approximately 6% chance of developing Long COVID/ME/CFS should I catch it. If I become too disabled to work, then it's true that I am royally screwed. My six months out of work due to my brain injury showed me the limits of my support network. My friends can only show up for me to a certain extent.
I spend my life avoiding not just the fruits of life but also the vegetables of life! The meat and potatoes of life! Because I don't know what will happen on the day I finally catch COVID. That's why I had felt so relieved when I thought I had finally, surely, caught COVID. It was like seeing the monster in the horror movie. No matter what COVID did to me, I would finally have that answer, "this is what happens to me when I catch COVID. This is what the monster does to you when it gets you." Having tested negative five times, it's like one of those fake-out jumpscares.
What seems to help the most with all my symptoms always seems to be exercise and stress reduction. Contra dancing gets me to exercise, but when I mask while dancing, I have to dance less. COVID precautions make my life more stressful. If my mask breaks while on public transit, I begin to panic, even if I am the only person on the bus. This is not a rational or healthy response. Trying to figure out how to eat outdoors or away from other people is often very stressful when in a setting with no outdoor seating. It's socially isolating every time I go eat alone in a parking lot in the dead of winter while others eat together at a table. Social isolation weakens my social support network, and a strong social support network is what I would need most should I catch COVID and develop Long COVID/ME/CFS.
The winter is coming, and I know I should heighten my COVID precautions and go back to living a more cautious lifestyle, but I do not want to. I am dreading that return to pandemic living. I want to continue to live a full and vibrant life. I want to live out the mid-to-late-twenties I didn't get to have. To say "I would rather die than continue to live a COVID cautious life" feels extreme and suicidal. Simultaneously, does it not feel kind of self-harming to say "I would rather cut myself off from community and the majority of things that bring me joy in life to avoid a semi-annual 6% risk of worsened disability?"
Solidarity with My People
When I see someone wearing a mask at an event—especially if they are trans—I know they are likely "my people." They likely share a large set of shared values and cultural references with me, and our personalities will probably mesh well. They are more likely to be living in "my world." In "my world" it's not shocking to hear that someone has multiple partners, that they're autistic, that they're estranged from biological family, or that their pronouns are it/its. It's normal for people to identify with dogs, dragons, robots, fairies, and clowns. Someone talking about their fetishes might be over-sharing in some contexts, but you're never surprised by what they're into. "My people" love a good info-dump, rather than responding with "wow, you sure know a lot about this."
When I unmask at an event, and encounter a masked trans person, I feel like I am cutting myself off from "my people." I know what it's like to be the only masked person at an event. I know the stress, the social stigma, the feeling of not belonging. I know how someone else wearing a mask can create a sense of solidarity, a sense that this space can be for me too. In the war against viral spread in a space, when I unmask, it feels like I'm abandoning my comrades and joining the normies. I know how someone not being masked can sometimes feel like a social barrier, an anxiety, wondering if that person lives in some fundamentally different reality than me. I know the anxiety of wondering if someone doesn't mask because they don't care if I live or die as a disabled person. I know the social anxiety that any given unmasked person thinks I'm crazy. I know the resentment of feeling like all the unmasked people are contributing to changes in public spaces that make the world fundamentally more dangerous for me to exist in, and the total isolation and marginalization that creates.
I was unmasking at most contra dances I attended for five months, yet the two dancers I've become actual friends with both mask for most dances. Likewise, one of the few people I've befriended at choir is one of the people who masks. The people who mask continue to be the people I get along with best. Masking does not isolate me from these people, it further connects me to them.
I asked my contra friends for mask recommendations after my warning shot cold. Maybe other masks than the ones I buy are better for dancing. I considered buying masks with exhale valves, they would certainly be easier to dance in. Some COVID cautious friends of mine justify wearing masks with exhale valves because they figure if they're the only masked person in a space anyway, then the mask is for protecting them from everyone else, not for protecting everyone else from them. In the end, I decided not to. Twice now, I had caught colds from dancing. If I wore a mask that only protects me, and I got infected at a dance on Tuesday, then I'd be giving that virus to every single person in the contra line. It's just not in my nature to justify something like that. One of my core personality traits is that I act with the entire community in mind.
Even though I was unmasking at contra, getting face to face with eighty to one hundred heavily panting people, I continue to mask at shul, where there are usually fewer than fifty people. Why? Because of the ongoing conflicts and community strife around masking in our local Jewish community. Because unmasking feels like conceding to the anti-maskers that the mask mandate wasn't necessary and should be abolished. At Rosh HaShanah services this year, someone tried to take down the signs indicating the masks-required seating section: "not enough people are wearing masks to justify this" is what they said. If I don't visibly wear a mask in the masks-required seating section, then that is one fewer person using it. If I lose that solidarity with the other COVID-cautious people, the majority could decide to abolish the remaining COVID policies that do exist to protect the minority. Visibly wearing a mask continues to combat the stigma again mask-wearers by having more masked people in public life, normalizing masks, and making other masked people feel more safe and welcome in a space.
Yet here again is my Moral OCD. Will the masks-required seating section really be abolished if I specifically stop using it? Does it all really rest on my shoulders? It's very difficult to be a collectively-minded person in our individualist American society.
Maybe it will, maybe it won't. The only correct answer you ever give someone with OCD. Maybe, maybe not. It's never satisfying. OCD isn't treated with satisfying answers.
A friend of mine with OCD told me the only way for them to cope with this pandemic world, where we have no truly reliable authorities we can trust on what precautions are necessary, was to accept their risk of developing Long COVID as inevitable. Something that's going to happen to them, or it won't, and to stop trying to control it. The approach I used to take to catching colds before the pandemic.
Will the upcoming winter spike be the worst in years, or the best in years? Maybe, maybe not. Will COVID ever really go away? Maybe, maybe not. Am I going to keep taking COVID precautions like this the rest of my life? Maybe, maybe not.
The winter is coming, and I am dreading it. I don't like the lonely cold months where everyone leaves for holidays and I am alone, hiding from COVID. It's for another essay, but I'm on good terms with my parents again, so I'll probably call them this year, but it's not in the budget to visit them this year. Traveling for the holidays is how you catch COVID anyway. That's COVID spikes when it spikes.
I want to live my life. I want to pursue feeling alive. I only have one life to live, and I don't get another one for having lived this one in a perfectly moral, sensible, and safe fashion.
I cannot deny the reality of the risk of COVID to myself and others, and have faced immediate consequences for taking risks. I cannot ignore how much I have to lose if I develop Long COVID. I cannot reality-shift into the reality tunnel where COVID is of no concern. But I cannot deny that I want to stop taking so many precautions, and that I have much to gain from that change.
I want to live, and masking means giving up a lot of what living entails, and not masking means potentially losing the rest of my life that I still have. When the Winter comes, will I keep masking and isolating? Maybe I will, maybe I won't. When the Winter spike wanes, will I keep masking at contra? Maybe I will, maybe I won't.
I want to live in this complicated world of ours. What I want to do is live.