Hi,

I feel beat up. I spent the entire weekend in suspended animation. I fell asleep at noon and ended up dreaming weird dreams. In one of them, my father was whispering in my ears that the sweets he’d couriered me and I was eagerly waiting for never reached me because the delivery man ate them. Then at night, I fought sleep and ate a snack of oranges and glucose biscuits. I stumbled into furniture, broke glasses and mugs, and ended up pleading with my toddler not to perform his customary banging-the-table act because it made me dizzy with anxiety. I dug into the badly cracked skin of my heels and made them bleed. I started writing this newsletter, then gave up because the white background of our content management system made me feel like I was staring at the hollow inside of an enormous bone. It gave me such a headache.

I feel like I was supposed to be somewhere else, a place from where, happily, there’s no coming back, a place so sensitive to the toxins of this world that to go there you must throw away everything you own and wrap yourself in sanitised cling film. But then I woke up on Saturday morning, and I was still here, and I still had on the faded grey T-shirt that doesn’t fit me well anymore because of all the late night bingeing, and the air outside – of course, outside is a theoretical concept for me because I haven’t stepped out in weeks – was still the familiar colour of jaundice thanks to Delhi’s early winter pollution. How utterly pointless.

Apparently, mind doctors have a name for what I am feeling. They call it the letdown effect. “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,” “And if people aren’t prepared for it, it can be a crash. The higher the accomplishment, the bigger the crash.”

Basically, when you’ve been stressed as heck for days and then suddenly the pressure lifts, you feel like a blob of toothpaste ejected from the tube at great speed. Wasted.

Maybe you’ve been telling yourself that after you’ve signed a contract for that book you’ve always wanted to write (as I just did) or crossed 5,000 followers on Twitter (that too happened), or when the denizens of a kingdom faraway have defeated the Orange Ogre, you’d feel fulfilled.

But those things come and go. And. Nothing. Really. Happens. You were expecting to feel relaxed and energised, like you can do anything. Instead, you feel like you have been handed a fat telephone directory and ordered to tear it with your bare hands. This is cheating, you want to whine.

“When you think about these larger events, they’re like a hub in a wheel: There’s a way your life orients around it, and then when you remove it, there is a hole,” Mirgain adds.

According to Marc Schoen, another psychologist who has extensively researched this phenomenon and written a book with the apocalyptic title When Relaxation Is Hazardous to Your Health,

Just great.

I’m trying to end this newsletter on an upbeat note by offering you solutions to manage this crisis, in case you too are reeling under it, but there’s nothing really very profound that I can say. Exercise. Breathe (into a mask). Schoen says solving crossword puzzles can also help.

If these suggestions help you, let me know. Meanwhile I will go and eat some sweets. They just arrived after all, so maybe, just maybe, some nightmares really do pass.

PS: For a more coherent take on how to make sense of The Year When Nothing Happens, may I recommend my latest column:

Until next week.

Correction: In an earlier version of this newsletter, Marc Schoen’s first name was misspelt as Mark. We regret the error.

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