Post-event blues: the crash after the high

I have written a lot about mental fog and depression lately. There’s a good reason. It’s about my real state of mind at present. I’m just staying on topic, so to speak.

It’s always been curious to me how there is a letdown after a big event. The anticipation of something is always fun, exciting even. You keep building toward something, an experience or goal or whatever. Then after it happens, the bottom seems to fall out.

What happens is mostly chemical in the brain. After the event, you just run out of feel-good chemicals, and you feel down because the tank is empty.

I felt that pretty strongly when I participated in little theater. I do like acting. I did not like the long, endless practices, but what I hated most was the letdown. You build toward this performance, and then you do it a couple of times and - you are done. No. That’s just too intense for me. You have this new knowledge of how to do a production that you worked toward, got the high of doing it, and then nothing. That was the most intense post-event letdown I ever felt, and I did not want to feel that again.

I felt something of that after the Walnut Valley Bluegrass Festival in Winfield. It was particularly bad a couple of years ago. I wrote a story about that shortly after it happened. Here is that story.