Oh my god, I am so over being sick. For more than a week I’ve been sick with what’s turned out to be a sinus infection. It’s been the worst. I finally went to the doctor and she gave me antibiotics. She also said, “I was trying to remember the last time you came in for a sick visit, and I couldn’t remember, so I looked on the computer, and it’s never! You’ve never come in for a sick visit.” I do get sick, but I also get over it really quickly – like a day. Maybe two. This has been unprecedented.

The worst is that for most of this time, I’ve barely been able to read (too much sinus pressure behind my left eye), and I’ve been all but incapable of executive function of any kind. I hate not being able to think.

The best part is nothing. I hate it all!

I’m very fortunate in that I was able to fall off the edge of the earth and my team carried on seamlessly without me. I had a call yesterday with two of my team leads, and I asked “how’s Tumblr doing?” and they said, “it’s fine.” And it was! Everything was going smoothly, and was well in hand. As I slowly got back into work yesterday, I handed over some work that was sitting on my plate but I couldn’t figure out for the life of me, and it’s a true pleasure to see my team taking it on and handling it well. I had no doubt. I consider a big part of my job to grow my leads and their skillsets so they can either do anything, or can figure out how to get anything done. That they feel confident reaching out and asking subject matter experts, or have ideas on where to go to look things up, or whatever. That they can navigate Automattic with confidence. That’s probably the biggest gift I can bestow, and I do think about it all the time. I think that part of that mindset includes an ownership mentality. We all “own” Automattic (I mean, literally in that we do have shares, but I don’t just mean literally), and we should act like it. You have confidence navigating your own house or apartment, right? Same should be true in this job. And I’ve been able to rest my big dumb swollen head the last week knowing that the work was in good hands.

As a side note, I’ve found that I’ve been listening to my favorite podcast (My Favorite Murder – my last planned trip of the year is taking Henry to a live taping in Nov!). It’s helped me sleep and to just… be, I guess. And the same thing happened when I was in the hospital a few years ago. I would just listen to these episodes with earbuds in, and would fall asleep (or, more accurately, pass out from too much morphine) and drift through the pain. I have no idea what episodes I was listening to, and I wonder (as I re-listen to the catalog) what might happen when those episodes resurface. Will I know? Will it be triggering? Thinking about that time is still really painful and hard. So I guess we’ll see!

Anyway, the antibiotics have been working a treat. The left side of my face is still puffy, and I can feel my sinuses in my bones on that side, which is deeply unpleasant. My teeth ache from the pressure. But! I can THINK AGAIN! So who cares about anything else? And it’s halloween, and the twins turn 14 tomorrow! And on Sunday I travel to Ireland for my last meetup of the year. So I really had a pretty hard deadline on getting better, and I’m glad to have made it.