I am at my parents' place to attend my favourite cousin brother's wedding. The weather is infernal and the atmosphere ominous. My aunt, his mother, is a cancer survivor. My father, beloved micromanager-in-chief at all family dos, is immobilised by the straitjacket the doctor has ordered him to wear after he broke a rib in a freak accident. My grandmother, with a history of brain stroke, has been passing out in the middle of chopping vegetables. My mother is sweating buckets and constantly humming a shaky, indistinct tune under her breath. I don't associate song with my mother. I wonder if her anxiety pills have made her musical.
There is joy, too, but like any other wedding in my overwrought family (or any wedding anywhere in the world, especially where the guest list runs into the low 600s) the joy lies crumpled under the weight of stress. So many checklists. So few fit legs. Such suffocating humidity. So much can go wrong. You have to yank out the joy from under this heaving anxiety from time to time, smoothen its creases, hold it up like those banners cueing 'LAUGH!' and 'CLAP!' to the audience on the set of a reality TV show.
I can already visualise the aftermath. I have seen it play out a hundred times. It looks like a pile of exhausted bodies. Mysterious fevers, aches and pains, bad mood (and out-of-control bowels). You’ve been tightly wound up for days and then suddenly the tension eases, and you feel like a blob of toothpaste ejected from the tube at great speed. Wasted. Doctors call this collapse after a big event the let-down effect.
"The let-down effect is a psychological and physical phenomenon that can cause illness or symptoms after a stressful period," says WebMD. "It can happen when you finally have time to relax, such as after a big life transition, a vacation, or a stressful event at work."
Here's psychologist Shilagh A Mirgain: "You have this mobilisation of inner energies to take action on something big, and afterward you think you’ll be exhilarated because you accomplished it, but you could have this letdown instead.”
If you aren’t prepared for it, it can be a crash. The higher the accomplishment, the bigger the crash.
