Sara and the Dope

[tablesaw]

Last week I was feeling pretty terrible at the end of the week, and I was trying to figure out how to describe it to Psyche.

It was tied up a lot with the energy I invested into preparing the talk for Gallifrey One. Getting ready for a public presentation (performance) was exciting, and it got a lot of creative engines running that had been rusting for a while. For all the self-doubt and anxiety that came from putting myself on the line, it felt good to research something I found interesting, shape it into a script, iterate it, and finally present (perform) for an audience.

But afterward, I was feeling both amped up and let down. My brain was often in overdrive, and I found it hard to focus, and it was tiring. My own self-doubt crept in, and I felt at wits end to follow up the excitement from the week before. It didn't feel like a similar convention experience a few months earlier, when I ran some games at Big Bad Con, which also took preparation, but left me feeling energized and excited to do more. It felt more like the end of my time in college, when every play I directed or acted in felt like a lifeline out of despair. It was making me wonder if public performance might be hazardous to my happiness.

Psyche, noted that what I was describing was very like (in very broad terms) the actions of dopamine and serotonin. The high and drop I was describing from performance was like how dopamine acts for thrill-seekers. In contrast, serotonin was more like community and contentment. This definitely struck a chord with me. I'd felt unable to take a breath that week and relax and enjoy the sky as I often do. And I was already thinking back to my 20s, a darkness I ultimately emerged from by taking SSRIs (which keep serotonin in the system).

It's been a helpful framing for me. And something to think about as I try to do things like get in the habit of writing a blog again. The extreme highs of performance are not something that's going to go away, but having a less magical way of confronting them helps. And it helps to keep things like that in mind while trying to keep writing a blog.