It is true, you remember correctly, that I also think that and had said so. Now I am not alone in the world and the many people I have met since that event and its consequences, who I have talked to and who have had their dignity taken away without much ado, rub off on me.

Clients who were visibly struggling with their mask, breathing heavily and constantly in their face with their hand to touch the mask, they obviously gave up their dignity for me. Such things hurt me to see.

Part of me knows, of course, that they could have pulled it off at any time in my presence and in most cases I made a gesture or otherwise indicated that I did not require them to wear the mask.

But when it came to the point where we were all supposed to wear masks at work and I had an exemption but felt compelled to refrain from making the gesture because my colleagues' patrols made it impossible for me to take my own liberties. But of course, I could have done it anyway and then I would probably have been expelled from my work earlier. I wasn't ready then to write my work into the wind.

The boundary between "you" and "me" is often fluid. I feel what my fellow human beings feel because I have a very thin filter between them and me. This thin filter, I explain to myself, stems from my childhood years when my strategy for finding my way in my environment was to try to classify the moods of adults and check out their sensitivities before I did anything or asked anything.

This is a great strength when it comes to imagining different perspectives and finding an approach to people around me, but it is my greatest weakness when it comes to protecting myself.

In those cases I haven't felt struggling from the other person with their mask on, it was okay as I cannot decide for them and shall not do so to think they lost dignity because they obviously didn't.

Yes, I listen to my inner self, after all, to whom shall I listen otherwise? :)