To everyone who feels inexplicably sad, exhausted, depressed even, seemingly for no reason after doing something really fun or invigorating or emotionally fulfilling:

It’s okay. You’re not a failure, you haven’t been lying to yourself about how much fun you’ve had or how awesome the people you’ve been with are. It was great and they are awesome.

Even if you didn’t really do anything, even if it was another day at the office or going out to the shops or even filling in Adulting Forms.

Your brain is now busy integrating everything you’ve been doing for the past few hours/days/weeks — your individual, highly specific brain-buffers are filling up — and it needs downtime.

Your brain can only handle so much input at a time before it needs to throttle down and churn through the backlog of sensory data, emotions and fiddle with hormone levels.

It’s OK to feel the crash and it’s equally OK to want the space to decompress, process and let the emotional noise subside a bit before embarking on the next adventure.

Sometimes all it takes is five minutes. Sometimes it takes a few hours, days or even weeks. All of those timescales are valid for you.

You might forget about this immediately upon reading because until you spot the self-same patterns in your behaviour, you might not make the same connections but I hope that when you do, you’ll be a little kinder to yourself during your ‘down’ phases.