The Day After Your Birthday

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People don’t like telling the bad news about being a writer, or any content creator. The lonely times. The pitiful “you’re ignoring me” looks you get from your children. The thrill at getting a $30,000 book deal and then realizing how much work went into your book, which means, after agent and taxes, you made $6.50 an hour.

But the thing that I think most people don’t talk about is the one that makes us sound ungrateful. And that’s what I call the Day After Your Birthday syndrome.

You know the day after your birthday, or maybe your wedding, or Christmas, any event you put a lot of preparation and hope and dreams and effort and love into… and then it’s over? And you may be surrounded by presents and people and love and happiness, but yesterday, with the work and the anticipation, it was almost better?

That is how you feel when you finish a book.

I have a friend who prepares for this. Her boyfriend is ready with sushi and sake and a shoulder to cry on as she mourns the end of her book. When I finish a book, I feel like I’ve climbed a mountain but am too tired to enjoy the view. Hollow, numb, exhausted.

People don’t expect stuff like this. They expect you to be triumphant and happy and accomplished when really what you want to do is crawl under a blankie.

This is normal. And no one talks about it.

I have a friend who’s a boxer, and she spent months gearing up for her second pro fight. She drove to Atlanta, and she fought, and she was good. She didn’t win, but she was very satisfied with the way she fought. She considered the whole experience to be awesome. Until she got home. Afterward, she was depressed, let down, and felt adrift.

Think about it. You spend days, perhaps months, sometimes years, working toward something. Maybe training, maybe writing a book, maybe getting a degree. Once that thing comes and it’s over, then your entire brain, your hormonal response to things, has to be rewrired. In most cases you have to look to the next book, the next fight, the next challenge, and that gets you focused and working. But in the rest time, in the very post-The End moments, your life is dominated by a very loud Now What?

In April, 2011, I did a Kickstarter campaign to support a project. It was very, very successful and I was thrilled. I ended up making close to $20,000. But a few days after being done with it all, I was… down. I’d had a hugely successful campaign, my listeners and readers came out in droves to support me, and … I was down. Which made me feel guilty because if I was down then clearly that meant I was ungrateful.

After some soul-searching, I realized that for an entire month, I would get emails, mostly daily, often several a day, that said, “This person has pledged $X to your campaign!” This was a little dopamine hit to my brain, a little “you really like me!” Sally Field moment. Once the campaign was over, those emails stopped. I had huge support, and a lot of work to do, but I was still somewhat missing those little pokes that said “you’re awesome.”

These are feelings you have on a hormonal level. I’m no scientist, but I know enough about dopamine and endorphins and adrenaline to know that when you flood your body with these good things (which you often do as you work hard toward a triumphant project end), then the body doesn’t like it when they go away. There’s no more anticipation about birthday gifts or party games. There are no more presents under the tree. There are no more emails telling you that you’re awesome. The holiday is over, the project is done, and your body is craving those hormonal shots like nobody’s business.

So when you finish a project and the sadness creeps in, the malaise, embrace it. Know it’s there because you’ve changed your focus from gottafinishbookgottafinishbook to something else. Submit book? Start new book? Whatever. Keep going, and know that everyone feels it, but no one talks about it.