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Lil has always understood that Tuesday is the worst, but final, day of a bender come down.
After a Flume concert at the Gold Coast in 2011, she said her trip back home bearable, it was her first day back at work on the Tuesday.
“Terrible Tuesdays we used to call it” she says.
After Mardi Gras 2015, when she joined her gay friends in an ecstasy-riddled weekend of debauchery in Sydney, she said she’d never felt as scattered and uncomfortable as she did on the Tuesday.
“It’s almost like universal. The Tuesday is the worst. I always thought that”
“But then it gets better”
However, after one of the biggest weekends in her life, in terms of schedule, physical activity, and other recreational activities – Lil is starting to think that she might be permanently feeling low for the rest of her life.
“It’s Wednesday and I’m not feeling any better. My brain is ruined. I’ve ruined my brain” whimpers the part-time waitress while trying to serve an outdoor table of baby boomers who keep changing their order.
A ‘comedown’ or a ‘crash’ is the deterioration in mood that happens as a psychoactive drug, typically a stimulant. After a drug has elevated ones the mood (a state known as a high), there follows a period of coming back down, which often has a distinct character from withdrawal in stimulants.
Generally, stimulant comedowns are unique in that they often appear very abruptly after a period of focus or high, and are typically the more intensely dysphoric phase of withdrawal than that following complete elimination from the bloodstream.
Besides general dysphoria, this phase can be marked by frustration, anger, anhedonia, social withdrawal, and other symptoms characteristic to a milder mixed episode in bipolar disorder. Alertness and other general stimulant effects are still present.
Lily, who says she’s usually pretty good at riding out the post-bender low, says she’s just got to get used to living a life without the ability to feel normal emotions again.
“That’s it. Better pack in. No more normal feelings again. I’ve had a good run. That Liam Gallagher gig was worth it I ‘spose”
“Oh my god. Did you just hear that?”
“I swore I heard someone saying my name”
“Holy shit I’m so scat”
