While many who have experienced the isolation of quarantine can relate to feelings of loneliness, what may be surprising is the potential for loneliness while working in the airline industry. “By nature, working as a flight attendant is a really isolating job if you don’t fight for community,” Ashworth explains. “I never work with the same crew so every flight that I work, I’m meeting new people.”
Not only could Ashworth be working with an entirely new crew on each flight, but on a busy workday with multiple trips, flight attendants could be interacting with up to 900 people, each with their own experiences, needs, and struggles. For this reason, she began using comment cards available on her planes to leave artistic and encouraging notes for her passengers. She will hand draw beautiful scenes of the flight’s destination, funny jokes or words of affirmation, and stash them in seat pockets for upcoming passengers to find.
While Ashworth has been creating these notes for close to a year, at the onset of the pandemic she decided to shift the recipients of her cards to the people working alongside her. “What I’ve realized over the past few months is that while I want to leave notes for passengers, I actually think that other flight attendants could use that encouragement too because I know that for me, it gets to the point where I’ll feel like ‘I could really use a pep talk,’” she explains. “I want to take care of the people that I work with because I know that if I take care of them, then they’ll take care of our passengers”
For those working in the airline industry during this tumultuous time, Ashworth’s hope is that her art would serve to bring her coworkers a moment of hope, to encourage them to continue on. Her art can be found on Instagram @aflyingartist