Post-Partum Depression

I bet you don’t have a preacher friend to give you good advice when you call his online digital voicemail and tell him you’re down. I do. I called him and told him I was a little bit depressed.

In his wisdom, he said, you might be suffering from a kind of post-partum depression. You’re giving birth to a conference. (Nothing here is meant to take away from the actual experience of post-partum depression, which I know a bit about from close family experience. It’s more of a metaphor, so save the “You have no idea” emails. You’re right.)

But I think Jon’s right. This is kind of like the silence before the storm. This is the beauty. Because what happens next will be the reality. It won’t be my fantasy. It won’t be the perfectly concocted experience, where I somehow am able to shake hands and hang out, and have deep conversations with 300 people.

Instead, it’ll be all kinds of little things needing fixing, problems of logistics, arguments of smaller proportions. It will be things we NEVER anticipated biting our ass in front of hundreds of people. It will be people thinking I snubbed them, when really, I just had too many threads running in my head to absorb something else. It will be hurt feelings. It will be someone pulling something at the last minute that causes a huge rift in what we originally anticipated.

Everything will go crazy. The power will go out. Boston will be evacuated. They won’t find anyone’s reservations. There’ll be a car accident or a heart attack, and someone’s problem will cast a pall over the entire experience. Things will go horribly wrong.

Or everything will be fine.

I have 1.75 days left to live the dream. It’s beautiful here. I am happy, and I’m leaving everyone with that feeling tha they matter, that they’re important, that they have valuable information and wisdom that I want to experience and absorb. In here, I’ve somehow managed to pull this thing off, with Chris and Bryan and Adam and Steve and Sooz, and everyone else who helped. In here, we’re already counting attendance for PC2. RocketBoom has dedicated a week to us. Galacticast has moved to Boston to set up shop so that I can play that crucial swing role: fat army sargeant 1.

I have to go now. My dream was interrupted by the fact that I think the website’s down. Yep, the PodCamp website.