Post-Con Depression
| Synonyms: | Post-Con Blues |
| See also: | Con Plague, Zine Farr |
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Many fans socialize in person at conventions or in small local gatherings. Even after email began taking root in fandom in the mid 1990s, attending a fan-run convention was often the high point of a fannish year. Or if one were more lucky, every few months.
For some fans, "Post-Con Depression" (also "Post-Con Slump," "Post-Con Letdown," and "Post-Con Blahs") is the feeling one has after returning to the real world after a con. This can be a readjustment for some fans: they miss their fannish friends, the ability to communicate in a fannish shorthand, shared experiences, and often the feeling that they are not alone in their fannishness.
Some Mentions of Post-Con Depression/Slump/Letdown
1979
I returned from Augustparty with what is becoming my normal post-con depression. This time I tried to analyze it; only part of it is attributable to total exhaustion. The rest—the great preponderance —is due to an overdose of bad zines. [1]
1981
Your hand reaches up, as if with a life of its own, to turn on the radio — but you stop yourself. Too soon to surrender.
[snipped]
At the office, two closet fen pump you for details of the weekend. You tell them everything worth telling, embellishing it here and there — and in the telling, you think more clearly about what you did, and savor one last residue of delight. In the end, however, you just miss it more.
When general office talk isn't on work, it's on sports or soaps or whatever was in People magazine. You grip a pencil till your knuckles whiten; you almost hope they start rehashing who shot J.R., just to see them jump when they hear the pencil snap. [2]
1990
It feels so good to be with other SH fans and friends and live together for a week-end that the post-con letdown is fierce at times... kind of like being separated from a co-joined twin, I think. If you've never gone to a con, you really ought to sometime to MEET and GET to KNOW other fen. You're ... none of us ... are alone out there. [3]
1997
Tuesday continued to be a Bad Day when another friend asked me if it was hard to come back to me real world. I said, "Honey, I just left -my- real world." [4]
Meta
- Munday: a do-it-yourself participatory memoir by E. Michael Blake (1981)
- I'm beginning to think I'm the only one suffering from Post-Con Depression, but I know that that can't possibly be true. by lovesrain44 (1997)
References
- ^ from Ellen Kobrin in Interstat #23 (September 1979)
- ^ Munday: a do-it-yourself participatory memoir by E. Michael Blake (1981)
- ^ from Frienz #9 (May 1990)
- ^ I'm beginning to think I'm the only one suffering from Post-Con Depression, but I know that that can't possibly be true. by lovesrain44 (1997)