Sick Leave
“Make sure you don’t push yourself too hard – if people notice you’re pushing yourself, they’ll be much less impressed with your accomplishments than if they thought you weren’t pushing yourself at all!”
– My brain
So I finally got COVID last week (for real this time, not a false positive) and it hit me pretty bad. Not too bad, thankfully, but about as bad as a pretty bad flu does – as in, I was miserable and bed-ridden for about two days, then feeling somewhat fine from the third day onward (other than a lingering cough that gets pretty annoying).
The bed-ridden phase hit me last Wednesday (the morning after staying up late finishing The Swordtaker) and it really made me worry that I might not recover in time to finish a comic by the following Monday. Then it made me wonder, “Wait, why does that worry me? No one’s holding me to account for these things. I’m sure if I just told people I’m sick and taking a week off, no one would hassle me about it.”
And then I started to wonder, “How should I deliver the message that I’m sick? A little doodle of me being sick? A short little joke about being sick? A call-back to my previous COVID scares?” Eventually, I realized that with all the effort I was putting into trying to “cleverly” inform my readers that I was sick, I could just use that “cleverness” to make a regular comic. So I just made a regular comic.
– James
