I’ve been traveling full-time for a decade now and, naturally, I have gone through my fair share of neck pillows—from cheap, inflatable airport pillows to U-shaped memory foam neck pillows. Despite trying just about every travel pillow on the market, there’s only one that has truly brought me comfort on long-haul flights, and it also happens to be the most compact.

The Trtl Neck Pillow is a serious game-changer in my books. This scarf-like neck pillow is easy to wear, comfortable, and is made with a super soft hypoallergenic fleece fabric. It has an internal support structure that functions like a neck brace of sorts, working to hold my head upright on hours-long flights—no matter what plane seat I’m in. 

Trtl Neck Pillow

I have Thoracic Outlet Syndrome (TOS), a condition marked by pressed nerves and blood vessels in the upper back. This continuous compression usually causes me to suffer bouts of debilitating pain after long-haul flights. The support structure of the Trtl Neck Pillow, however, helps prevent this strain by keeping my head and neck upright during the flight. 

While I usually place the internal support over one of my shoulders, it can also be tucked under the neck. But regardless of where I put it, it prevents my head from bobbing. Once it’s secured in place, I snuggle into it by resting one side of my face on it, falling right to sleep soon after. I prefer to fly in the aisle seat, which means that I often don’t have a window to lean up against—but I don’t even need one, thanks to the Trtl pillow’s ability to keep my neck supported while sleeping upright.

Most recently, I used this pillow on a 13.5-hour flight from Madrid, Spain, to Santiago, Chile. I was unfortunately dealing with a pain flare-up at the time, but thanks to the Trtl pillow,  I fell right asleep and woke up without any cricks in my neck. And according to my Ultrahuman ring, I slept for eight hours, which might be why my usually-unbearable jet lag was essentially non-existent once I landed in South America.

Trtl Neck Pillow

Now, don’t expect the Trtl Neck Pillow to be plush. Amazon shoppers agree with me that there’s a learning curve when it comes to finding a sweet spot that works. It takes some adjusting in order for me to find the perfect position to wear it with my noise-canceling Sony headphones, which are also a must for me while flying. 

That being said, I love that the Trtl pillow isn’t bulky. At 138 grams, it’s incredibly lightweight, making it easy to stash in my bag. But if my carry-on is stuffed to the max, I just wrap it around the bag’s strap, so it virtually takes up no space. This also makes it easier to quickly grab during the hustle and bustle of boarding, before I set my carry-on bag in the overhead bin. Another great feature is that it’s super easy to clean; I wash it after every single flight. Simply remove the quick-drying fleece wrap covering and throw it in the washing machine when necessary. 

Trtl Neck Pillow

You’ll never catch me traveling on a bus, train, plane, or long car ride again without my Trtl Neck Pillow. I love it so much, in fact, that I’ve taken an Uber back home from the airport in order to retrieve it after I left it behind, risking my ability to board my flight from Uruguay to Spain on time. 

Apparently, I’m not alone—both pilots and flight attendants love it just as much as I do. One flight attendant of 42 years called it “the perfect travel pillow,” awarding it five stars for its portability and ability to make non-window seats comfortable. “I’ve tried dozens of neck pillows,” wrote another flight attendant, “and the Trtl Pillow is by far the BEST I’ve ever tried! I would recommend this to every passenger on every flight.”

A pilot who “commutes to work long distance” wrote that it’s “indispensable” for staying comfortable in the middle seat. “It feels like being wrapped in a cozy blanket,” they continued. “The first time I tried it I was easily able to fall asleep for 2 hours sitting in a middle seat.” Another five-star reviewer shared that the Trtl Neck Pillow is “the best travel pillow” they’ve found for their pilot husband thus far. “He loves it,” they wrote. “All the other pilots ask him where he got it because it’s a great pillow to travel with since it isn’t bulky.

I can’t recommend this scarf-like neck pillow enough—but if you’re still on the fence about the Trtl Neck Pillow, there are plenty more to check out on Amazon. Keep scrolling for five similar options, starting at $20. 

More Travel Neck Pillows to Shop:

Riverland Travel Neck Pillow

Szxyx Travel Neck Pillow

Velurie Neck Pillow

Cabeau Travel Neck Pillow

Buyue Travel Neck Pillow

At the time of publishing, the price started at $60.

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Of course Andrea Gibson would leave us in the middle of Disability Pride Month.

It feels like one final shout into the world: I was here. I was chronically ill. I mattered — and you do, too.

The first time I heard Andrea Gibson’s work, my partner — at the time, someone I was just beginning to fall in love with, now my spouse — sent me a YouTube video while I was commuting to a soul-crushing job. The kind of job where the Director of Human Resources once looked me in the eye and said, “Jesus loves you regardless of your lifestyle choices,” and my ableist boss regularly complained that I missed too much work for medical appointments.

I spent a lot of time literally hiding in my office, praying no one would knock or need anything. Every time someone looked at me, I had to shove whole parts of myself — my illness, my queerness, my heart — into the dark recesses beneath my desk.  Do not be queer. Do not be disabled. Do not be upset. Pretend you can keep up. Pretend you are like them.

The video was a performance of Andrea’s poem “Good Light.” I put in my earbuds and sat silently on the bus, letting the words wash over me:

“Got rid of my yes trying to make a no so big it could go back in time,
swallow everything that happened that should not have happened…
But then I met you and I started feeling myself open,
started feeling my yes coming back
and it was the sweetest thing I had ever known.”

At the time, I was fighting a confusing, escalating storm of symptoms. I was burning through sick days at a job that punished absence but gave no room for rest. The fatigue, the pain — it was often too much to even sit up in bed. And yet, the doctors I saw — some of the so-called best in the country — either shrugged or told me it was stress. No one believed me.

Then the algorithm delivered “Angels of the Get Through.” It felt like Andrea was sitting beside me talking directly to me:

“This year is the hardest of your whole life.
So hard you cannot see a future most days.
The pain is bigger than anything else.
Takes up the whole horizon no matter where you are.”

And I broke. I cried on the bus — publicly, messily, unavoidably — because I felt this poem understood me in some impossible way. So I did what anyone does when something cracks you open: I went down the inevitable internet rabbit hole. I searched for this Andrea Gibson person, hoping their work could help me make sense of myself.

What I found was someone who had lived with chronic Lyme disease, an illness the medical world still largely refuses to acknowledge. It’s one of several diagnoses akin to a modern day “hysteria” because so many doctors refuse to believe they exist and often tell patients that it’s in their head, like chronic fatigue syndrome, POTS, endometriosis, long COVID, and fibromyalgia.

Andrea wasn’t alone in this. There’s a long and powerful queer lineage of artists whose bodies were politicized, pathologized, and misunderstood and who still chose to create from that place. Frida Kahlo painted her pain. Audre Lorde wrote fiercely about her body, her cancer, and her Blackness. Andrea belongs in that legacy: queer artists who insisted pain was worth documenting — not to be pitied, but to be witnessed.

I’ve been living on the spectrum of disability my entire life (and yes, disability is a spectrum, not a binary), but the medical system was too sexist and too siloed to believe me. Finding Andrea’s words — and more than that, their pain — felt like throwing open a window I didn’t know had been sealed shut. I wanted to collect every quote and scrawl across my life like a teenager with a MySpace page: Believe me. Understand me.

Andrea had a rare and radical ability: They could name the agony of chronic pain and illness without giving in to hopelessness. Their work lived in the unspoken reality of being sick, not in the media-friendly story of the disabled person who bravely “overcomes.” They wrote about the real middle, the tightrope where so many of us balance our lives. Where illness is grotesque, humiliating, boring, enraging, lonely, normal. They wrote the whole brutal truth we often work to hide, so we can be the good, palatable disabled people we’ve been taught to be. Their words pulled illness out of the shadows, gave it dimension, contradiction, and beauty. In “Gender in the Key of Lyme Disease”, they write:

“Good God.
There isn’t a healthy body in the world that is stronger
than a sick person’s spirit.”

This is not a Hallmark movie kind of hope but the gritty kind that drags itself out of bed even when your joints say no and your blood pressure isn’t interested in standing. They wrote about the fever that felt like freedom because it came with a name and an end, just the flu. They wrote about being carried, literally, on a tandem bike by their partner. About the self-doubt that sneaks in when you wonder if someone could possibly love you with your illness. Gibson didn’t make illness pretty. They made it real.

Their poem “An Insider’s Guide on How to Be Sick” is one of the clearest examples of that: a raw, defiant manual for surviving the unbearable, one appointment, one crash, one breath at a time:

“This pain that wakes you screaming in the muzzle of the night / This pain that woke your lover, chased her to another room / to another life… This not knowing what the test will say / This pray pray pray / This hospital bed / This fluorescent dark.”

That poem didn’t pity sick people; it simply believed us, and it raged with us. It refused to perform for the healthy. And most importantly, it didn’t create a false happy ending. It offered truce. Not a cure, not resolution, but survival as protest. Survival as song.

“On my most broken days
when my faith is a willow
and the pain has nothing but an ax to give,
the only thing I want more than to die
is to live.”

“That needle is the needle on a record player, Doctor.
Everything–and I mean everything–can learn how to sing.”

In the wake of their death, I’ve seen so many tributes calling Andrea’s fight with cancer “brave.” But that word — brave — flattens what Andrea spent their life resisting. They weren’t interested in sanitized heroism. They didn’t perform inspiration. They told the truth.

 “A difficult life is not less worth living than a gentle one.” – Andrea Gibson, “Every Time I Ever Said I Want To Die”

It’s not about overcoming illness; it’s about living alongside it, through it. Yet many remembrances and articles have focused on their gender and their cancer while glossing over how long they lived with invisible illness and disability. Chronic pain that cannot be conquered and tied up neatly with a cure and a bow doesn’t make good headlines in an ableist world, but it shaped Andrea’s life and their voice. To leave it out is to miss something essential.

It might seem inappropriate, even uncomfortable, to quote so many of their poems about death in the wake of their own. But Andrea never shied away from that discomfort. As they wrote in “Come See Me In the Good Light”: “Everyone’s survival looks a little bit like death sometimes.”

Because the truth is: Living with chronic, incurable illness often does feel like hovering at the edge of life and death. We lose friends and community members far too soon. We live with statistics — life expectancy, survival odds, complication rates — etched into our minds. We take medications with side effects that sound more terrifying than the illness itself. And we’re constantly reduced to numbers: heart rate, blood pressure, blood counts.

Andrea understood this. You’d be hard-pressed to find a poem of theirs that doesn’t mention death, and yet, in that ongoing conversation with mortality, Andrea showed us how to live.

Their poem “Tincture” was first shared with me as a work-in-progress at a live show. Andrea said they wrote it as a lifeline — for the days when the pain was so bad they wished they didn’t have a body at all. It ends with a stunning moment: the soul, newly freed from the body, is greeted by the stars. The stars, desperate to understand:

“I can’t imagine it,” the stars say.
“Tell us about pain.”

And I think: I hope, Andrea, that you’re at peace. I hope you’re out there somewhere, telling the stars about pain.

Because your pain made us feel less alone in ours. You showed us what it could mean to live with pain, not despite it. To be queer, sick, brilliant, messy, hopeful, and real.

Thank you.

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