_{Photo by Abstral Official on Unsplash. Not pictured: me.}

The evening was on its back foot before I entered the bar. I’d accidentally repeated myself in an app message to a potential new friend and felt very silly while making an effort in something I already felt fairly inept at. Furthermore, I’d set out for the evening more than an hour later than I’d intended. Going dancing alone requires a little fortitude anyway, and I was already running low. Just go dance for an hour, I reminded myself as I waited for my train, and then you can do whatever. I’d been curious about this particular dance night for a while. So many in New York start at eleven or even later; this one positioned itself as nightlife for the over-30 set, starting at 5 PM and ending at 10. I got to the front door just before 9.

But it’s fine, I told myself. The idea was never to dance the whole time. It was to try this and see if I like it.

I got there late enough that no one checked my ticket, and deep enough into the night that the throbbing floor of dancers went almost all the way to the front door of the relatively small bar. I stood in a small empty spot for a moment, surveying the territory, both the bar and my own. I was very sweaty, as it had still been 85 degrees outside for my 15-minute walk from the subway, even after dark. The bar was cute, leaning into a certain retro 70s lounge vibe, but the pretty parts: rich wallpaper with metallic designs, a mirror ball over the bar, shelves with just-kitschy-enough tchotchkes, and a bed in the corner with a satin sheet on it, benevolently overseen by a centerfold of Burt Reynolds on the wood-paneled wall. Just enough, and not too much.

But maybe, I thought, the move next time is to get here in the first couple hours. The crowd felt friendly but already deep into their night and drinks. People danced mostly in trios and quartets, little circles of friends shaking their asses, definitely doing the more expressive dancing apparently typical of we millennials than the quieter vibing of the generation after. It didn’t leave a lot of room for a single body without a team of six elbows to defend the space. To get here in the first couple of hours, and with friends too.

All that was left was to lean in and go for it. I found a spot and summoned one of my more useful superpowers: the ability to comfortably dance sober and by myself. (This superpower also lets me sing karaoke stone-cold sober, which occasionally has its uses.)

I danced.

For about two minutes.

And then a man leaned over toward me.

“Is that comfortable?” he asked, gesturing to my green KN95 mask, my usual companion for nights like this. It’s not that I’ve had perfect attendance for mask wearing while out dancing; even I slip sometimes. But the days leading up to this event had been full of warnings about new variants, skyrocketing positive rates, and most recently one of my last no-vid friends finally getting hit. I could not justify going out in all this without one, particularly in this small space with so-so ventilation. New York zapped me with Covid just ten days after I’d arrived at the end of 2023, and I’m still figuring out what lingering side effects I have.

I was still so in my thoughts about finding a comfortable place to dance that it took me a long couple seconds to be able to answer this random man. When I did, I just said, “It’s fine?”

Another reason I was on my back foot: I can’t have good conversations when the music is loud. Never have. Even in my early 20s, when that’s a natural means of communication, I had a hard time hearing people over a band or DJ. Maybe she’s born with it; maybe she acquired early hearing loss in an era when parents didn’t provide hearing protection for children. A stranger trying to talk to me over loud music instantly summons my anxiety, because I know it’s about to get awkward. I’m also not very audible over loud music unless I really, really yell. No read, no write, just weird.

I don’t make friends at clubs, as you might imagine. And the friends I go to clubs with? We often converse by typing on phones, because my friends are merciful, have similar minor hearing loss, or both.

He gestured at his face. “Why don’t you take it off?” I was, at this point, almost hoping to sense a come-on; it would make this easier to deal with.

And it was such a strange question at that moment, after the last four years, after this era that’s felt a hundred years long. Why am I wearing it? I don’t know, assume mental illness if that makes you feel better? Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?

Instead, I answered as briefly as I could manage. “Risk management!”

I turned away, and that was enough to end it.

But it wasn’t enough to shake the off-kilterness I’d brought into the bar, which suddenly exponentially increased now that I felt bad-visible. Which I knew I was; as I expected, I was the only one in the bar wearing a mask, because that’s how it is now. I also appeared to be one of very few people who’d come alone.

I hung in there for a few more minutes, trying to salvage whatever I’d hoped to get from the night. I danced; I was around other people; I saw a new space. The experience of being around other people and dancing in all the glorious loudness took on a new importance to me while being shuttered away in my apartment in 2020 and 2021, and even though a lot of what goes with a setting like that doesn’t really serve me, it remains something I need to do now and then.

Even when it’s hard.

I seethed a little that a stranger felt comfortable suggesting that I hadn’t considered my choices enough, that I needed a random man to point out the error of my ways. Sir, if I could be audible over this music and if you cared, I’ll have you know that all I do is overthink. I haven’t not overthought something since I was approximately four years old.* For reasons, I don’t know how much of this is genetic anxiety versus the relentlessly too-high expectations put onto an eldest daughter, but the luxury of not thinking hard about things is slightly more elusive to me than putting my name on the deed of a superyacht.

Worse still, there was an actual good conversation to have here. I rarely mind questions asked in good faith, even if they’re a little intrusive. Wearing a mask in summer 2024 is a highly distinctive posture. Asking me why I do it in a way of actual curiosity will lead to interesting places: I am a risk-assessment professional, I can’t justify doing certain things without precautions, and threat modeling is inherently different for each person in each situation. That this is a strange world to live in for someone like me. It always is, but especially right now. There are good questions to ask; there are answers to them that I find nuanced and worth hearing.

None of that was happening there by the entrance to the bar.

In contrast, a few minutes later, I did something I’d never done in my entire life, not in all the years I’ve lived since being old enough to go into bars (and a little before too, due to college towns). A gently drunk woman who looked maybe 25 found me from the corner, proffering a tall glass filled with something pink. “Do you want this?” she called over the music. “It’s safe. I took it from my friend, because she is way too drunk, and I’m trying to save her.”

At first, I took it just to be helpful; I’ve been both the person trying to save the friend and the friend who needed saving. And then I thought about it, going through that very personal threat modeling. It came from a woman. I saw the drunk friend. All the facts supported what was being said, and my gut suggested this was fine. Weird, but fine.

And I needed a little good randomness after the last irritating span of time.

As I thought through all that, she went to her friend and came back with another glass, asking again for a particular kind of help. “THANK YOU!” she bellowed as I took the second one. “I don’t even know when she got this one!”

And so I stood there, holding two vodka cranberries, with no spare hand to move my mask to make a proper show of double-fisting. I thought about that for a moment too.

I ended up putting one on the bar and drinking the other, the sweetest drink I’ve had in at least a decade as an antidote to bad randomness, to a random man thinking that somehow I didn’t think things through before leaving home, that I needed some guy to lift the spell of not thinking and be released free into the world. My actual job is overthinking. Get away from me.

I drank my drink, I danced, and I thought about what I should have said. I wear this mask because my fangs scare people, maybe. Or, to be vicious in a way that might cause a stampede: I have Covid and don’t want to get people sick, but I still GOTTA DANCE!!!

The more succinct and completely appropriate response to his why, though, would be a classic: why don’t you go fuck yourself? Delivered with a winning smile, even if it couldn’t be seen.

But I was alone, and he was with friends, and I was still under the illusion that I could redeem this part of my night. I’d come out in the heat for it. I’d dressed up and done eye makeup for the first time in a while. I felt cute and had dressed to move.

I stayed with it until I’d been there for no more than 25 minutes, and then the little ball bearing in me that shifts to the other side of the meter when it’s time to go clicked over. I left the impressive AC of the bar for the sticky Manhattan night, where I talked to someone I love as I walked across downtown to the subway station that would take me directly home.

This, truly, is the missing part of my risk management: not disease prevention, not more rigorous defenses against people trying to slip something in my drink, but random men looking at me in all my decades of overthinking and deciding that I just hadn’t considered some things.

That I should or might want to justify my choices to a stranger.

Because that’s the real answer: because I don’t want to. Why don’t I take my mask off? Why didn’t I wear a purple dress instead of black? Why didn’t I stay longer, justifying the cost of the ticket that didn’t get checked?

Because I didn’t want to. Because I don’t want to.

Instead, I turned away and did exactly what I wanted to do, which was getting out of a pointless conversation, which was taking a long walk down 14th Street, which was going home to dye my hair and talk to a friend. Which was all the entire rest of my life, weird and exactly as I want it to be.

*I was probably an overthinker before the age of four, but as I can’t really remember anything from then, I choose to fill the void with a nice assumption, even if it’s probably wrong.