My re-entry into what I only half-jokingly call “real life,” post New York Comic Con this year was surprisingly rough. I was going to write “unexpectedly,” but that’s not actually true; for some reason, there’s always a strange mental hangover following this particular five day trip — perhaps it’s the time difference, or maybe its that New York State of Mind that everyone loves to go on about so much — but this year, it was especially present, and coming back to my everyday, especially difficult.
It was, maybe, that I was sick during the trip. Or, really, that I was half-sick, getting there and struggling against it with all my might, literally just willing myself to hold together until I could get back on the plane and fall apart entirely. (I always seem to struggle with sickness in New York, too, but that probably comes from the show happening at the beginning of October every year, when the weather starts to shift and people are getting sick in general.) The tickling throat and fuzzy headedness of being half-sick is hardly conducive to returning to the world.
Or perhaps it was exhaustion, brought on from overwork. This year, I somehow put myself through the ringer in terms of workload, filing 25 stories to THR in a three day period (as well as some graphics, and an additional Wired story that was ~2000 words) and working anywhere from 12 to 18 hours a day, depending. Why did this happen? What was I thinking? I have no idea; it just happened. I’d write until I was done, and it would just take a long time to be done, if that makes sense. But I ended the show tired beyond belief as a result, so perhaps that had something to do with it, too.
It’s not as if I didn’t expect it to be more difficult than usual; I even took the first day back off, which almost never happens, but that still wasn’t enough. It took days to feel normal again, and lose the restlessness that felt as if I was going to leave again at a moment’s notice.