Do you feel the aftermath funk?
A great poet - Lee Knight, Jr. - once wrote about that sad, gut-wrenching dynamic that follows most people out the door of the last poem of a large poetry slam event. It is the soul-sucking return to the common.
You hang out with dozens (or in the case of a national sized event, hundreds) of people who are dedicated to the thing you love to do. You are not only not alone, but you can't go a block in any direction and not see your kind. You know that everyone understands your nervousness and your excitement and your reasons, even the weird or bad ones. You get up on that mic and everyone within earshot is dedicated to listening to every utterance that comes out of your mouth for three minutes. An entire venue cheers for you wildly, and people give you props when you walk off.
And then you wake up the next morning and get ready for work. Where they don't clap when you speak. Where no one listens for three straight minutes to anyone else. Where no one cheers for you as you make your way through the office. Where you have little to no potential to change anyone's lives with your ideas.
It's depressing, really. It's like Lee said, where we're all these superheroes who then trade their costumes in and walk among unknowing masses once more. When you win something that significant and no one in your daily life quite gets it, quite understands just how many other completely phenomenal dreams and earnest missions you had to navigate to make yours stand out the most, it weighs on you. Even when you don't do as well as you wanted, the feeling remains. It might even be worse then because who do you share the pain of failure with? Who on your job understands what it's like to try to pull something out of your soul, share it to the best of your abilities and still not leave your mark? Sure, someone on your job gets it, but how would you find that person? Maybe we all walk around our offices at arm's length from eac other's hearts and dreams, unsupported in our own ways that are not so unlike the superhero world of Slam. Maybe professional arm wrestlers or Magic:The Gathering card players feel the funk, too.
It's something to think about.