The Pleasure and Peril of the Aftermath

When I was a kid, the end of any athletic season brought with it an inexplicable, overwhelming emptiness. After winning the championship basketball game in seventh grade, I dug my face into the backseat of our Subaru and cried. It wasn’t that I had played badly: it was the feeling that there was nothing left to look forward to; that everything in my life had been leading up to this one event and without it I was untethered. I’ve felt this purposelessness countless times since—after breakups, parties, graduations. I feel it when I leave a job, or move  apartments. It’s the realization that a single event has furnished all my life with richness, and with that moment in the past, there is no place from which to derive meaning. In a sense, all these experiences exist in one place: the aftermath. Not even fame or beauty can inure one to the thud of the after: Phil Stutz, the celebrity therapist recently profiled in NY Mag, coined the “Stutz 96-Hour Academy Awards Principle” to describe the depression that plagues recipients of the coveted award: “by the fourth day after winning, life sucks again.”