Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

This morning, rmc28 wrote a very good (and therefore very depressing) post about the UK's ending of all covid restrictions, support, and almost all testing.

One of the things she said was

I am not looking forward to being the weirdo in a mask who won't eat or drink indoors, when everyone else is busy pretending we're "back to normal" and ignoring the no-longer-monitored disease silently spreading everywhere people congregate. But I'd rather that than a heart attack in my forties, or fatigue for the rest of my life.

Obviously I quite agree with that conclusion, but the first sentence got me thinking...

I said in a reply, about that specifically

I have already been that weirdo (I don't know when I'll next be able to eat or drink indoors; beyond two near-unavoidable times, it hasn't happened since March 2020) and there sure aren't many of us in real life! Which is fine for me, I'm used to being noticeably weird (for being fat, queer, foreign, disabled, trans/at least sending off weird gender vibes, etc.), but a lot of people are going to be new at this.

I'm wondering what I can do to support that; like a guide for How to Be Okay with Being Weird in Public, or an online group...because while I'm being The Only One in the Shop Wearing a Mask, I know from my internet friends that there are actually a substantial amount of us. And an online group can't help that IRL weirdness, but it might be helpful to people to know there are actually a bunch of us out there, and we can support each other.

Someone I don't know replied to suggest a Discord or a Dreamwidth community and Discord isn't accessible to me (though I think this is a great idea if anyone else wants to start/run a group for this kind of thing there!) but I'd be happy to run a Dreamwidth community if there's interest in that kind of thing.

For all that there's been a cognitive load to assessing the kind of covid risk-budgets rmc28 talks about her family having, there's also a huge cognitive load to continuing to wear a mask/try to distance when the people around you aren’t. I'm going to have to miss my covid/disabled people meeting this month so I'm making notes on the papers ahead of a phone chat with the chair beforehand, and one of the notes I've written today is

Humans are such social creatures that many of us find it difficult to stand out and while some people don’t have a choice but to be visibly different, some of us who aren’t used to sticking out so much might benefit from some social support to carry on masking when society all around us is pushing this message that “the pandemic is over.”

I of course was thinking about disabled people in particular there but it's true of a lot of other people too, maybe even more so people who are used to thinking of themselves as "normal" and might be new to being a visible minority. It sure can be tiring! Even scary, or just offputting.

And it'd be nice to be able to vent and to cheer each other on. I hope it'd be possible to have a community like this without it descending into animosity to everyone unmasked or unvaccinated because there are people with medical reasons not to be and they will also benefit from as many people as possible continuing to wear masks and be careful. Our (justified!) ire is rightly directed at institutions, not individuals, especially marginalized ones.