Hangover – quite a common word.
Wikipedia defines it as an “experience of various unpleasant physiological and psychological effects following the consumption of ethanol” (Alcohol in common language).
This is a very general meaning of the word, however, the unpleasant physiological and psychological effects can be for various reasons – love, anger, fight, angst, irritation, etc. Have you ever felt a hangover from any of the above? Yes, then you will understand what I am talking about.
Superficially everything seems fairly sorted and even, but the unpleasantness lies somewhere under the skin after a huge fight or something wrong that just happened. I had a fight. With you ask. Let’s just say that I am married and I live with my in-laws so what has happened is really normal for an Indian household. Fights happen and I am not concerned about the fight or what happened during the fight.
What I am concerned about here is the hangover. There are times when the word uttered lose their meaning but it feels like they are hanging over (literally & sometimes figuratively) your head. The aftermath has happened. The tsunami came by, drowned you and somehow you magically survived. However, the survival is not enough. The lingering effects of the verbal tsunami remain. You don’t know how to deal with it. Does it go away eventually? Yes, like every other hangover it does go – but what happens until then.
Everything seems normal and natural but the pangs of pain keep coming. You act happy and smile ear-to-ear. Apologies don’t happen, and even if they do – they are fairly useless. Even when you do the formal apology, it does not really work. Then deep down inside you know you are wrong and yet not completely. In a fight, no one is completely wrong or right. The matters delve much deeper than that. How do we deal with that? Is there an Aspirin out there for such hangovers?
The physiological effects can be acted upon and you can work on a fake smile (I have years of practice – and it's magical) but the psychological effects can be really unnerving. I am scared for the first time in my life after a fight. And yes I have been in zillions of fights (both literal and figurative). Despite that, I have never been scared – not for my life but for some seemingly unknown reason. It’s the psychological reasons that hurt.
Can the hangover be dealt with? If so, how?
