#I went to comiket. 2021 chloe would probably be very mad at me for that

[tvwolfsnake]

genuinely had to completely change how I approached covid stuff when I moved to tokyo because I went from a NEET life of:

driving a car and basically only going indoors in public for necessities like a weekly grocery run or occasionally food pickup (but most non-grocery food was drive-thrus), fear and frustration at the lack of masking

to:

riding the sometimes-very-crowded train everywhere, buying groceries on a daily basis, having to shop for stuff I didn’t have in my dorm, attending in-person classes, making friends and seeing them in person, eating food inside restaurants because there’s little other option away from home (short of finding somewhere outdoors to eat a bento), feeling relative calm at near 100% mask rates, lots of temp checks, higher vax rates, and policies that actually went “hey this would be mitigated by better ventilation” unlike the US

I may have also gone a little crazy from the Actually Having A Reason To Be Out In Public and overdid it. the rough thing about being in an active pandemic that was not contained because of fucking profit motive is that you’re forced to take on all public health responsibility as an individual, and it’s kind of an impossible situation. especially as someone who could stay at home and has a significant tendency towards self-denial, where it already felt Noble and Right to make myself as small as I possibly could. being like that it’s easy to avoid forcing yrself to be out in the world—which is good for you—because this is a genuine emergency. except it has been. for years. and at a certain point I was going to have to weigh my own mental health against that

weirdly I’m grateful that tokyo made that decision for me