exhaustedOnly, see...I get the jet lag. I get the jet lag badly. I always have. I wrote an entire romantic comedy about jet lag (Chasing St. Margaret, not coming any time soon to a bookstore near you). I am not a girl who switches time zones quickly or easily. Normally, I deal with this by giving myself time before the convention to adjust. Sadly, this time, that wasn't an option, as I was a Special Guest at Emerald City Comic Con the weekend before. My schedule looked like this:
Monday morning, fly from Seattle back to San Francisco.
Tuesday morning, get my hair done.
Wednesday morning, fly to England.
Thursday morning, land in England.
Friday morning, the con begins.
...not ideal. And maybe it would have been okay if I had been able to sleep on the plane (I usually can), but this time the guy next to me wouldn't stop snoring, and I had a cough from the cleaning products at the airport, and it was no good. I was awake all the way to London, reading and fussing and trying not to be the worst person anyone had ever shared a plane with.
My handler picked me up at the airport and delivered me to the hotel, where I proceeded not to sleep. And not to sleep. And finally to sleep for twelve hours, which resulted in my sleeping through a panel. When I finally woke up, I went looking for her to apologize, and had literally upward of thirty people laugh and tell me they'd missed me.
Things not to do to people with anxiety: remind them thirty times that they are a failure.
I had a full-blown panic attack, complete with inability to breathe, and stopped sleeping again, since sleeping now equated directly to fucking up. HOORAY. I didn't sleep until I got to Teddy and Tom's after the con, where I crashed for thirteen hours, was up for three, and then napped. I never did get quite onto UK time. I've been home for over a week, and I'm barely returning to normal.
Jet lag sucks.
April 23 2015, 10:27:24 UTC 2 years ago
1) I am very sorry that I added to this
2) I did not detect that you looked stressed
3) It genuinely was not intended in any way as a 'you fucked up' reminder. The panel set out an empty chair for you, called for comments from you and it was all very entertaining. 'Your' comment got a round of applause. Nobody criticised you during the panel and while there may have been people in the room cross that you did not appear the vast majority of us worked on the assumption that there is no way in heck you would not have been there if you could have avoided it (and would have given a 'How stupid can you be?' look to anyone who had criticised you). So the motivation behind those comments (at least the motivation behind mine and I am extrapolating out) was that we had genuinely enjoyed the panel and were sharing an 'in joke' with you, failing (monumentally) to appreciate that it was an in joke only to the people who were there and not to the person who was not.
4) I am very sorry.
April 23 2015, 15:20:11 UTC 2 years ago