The Exhausting Social Hussle
I’m completely drained by this weekend, which has not been my typical weekend.
I had to staff visiting hours at The Belmont Goats on Saturday as usual, which was steadily busy for the entire three hours, half of which I had to handle solo. Then I had to return to the field in the late afternoon to be interviewed by a local news station about the herd’s next pending move. Then I agreed to come back late that night to let them shoot the live introduction to that story from the barn instead of from the parking lot.
Then I needed something restorative so I stayed up even later in order finally to finish the entire original run of Strangers in Paradise, which indeed provided a calm but meant not getting to sleep until after midnight.
Then I had to get up ad moving earlier than usual for a Sunday, which is the only one of our four visiting hours days, in order to meet a news crew from a second station at noon. Then I had to stick around because a third news crew was coming after closing.
That’s a lot of social hussling for my particular constellation of autism features, and I feel a bit like my body is trying to vibrate itself into some safer place that must exist somewhere beneath us all since gravity by necessity would have to be pulling me downward.
None of these disparate elements are bad things, and each and every one of them put something good into the world. But taken as a whole they are nearly completely exhausting.
For me, this is a lot of work to do for absolutely no financial gain. That’s not, of course, what the herd is about, but while some people become energized from the social hussle of this sort of work, I end of feeling like I deserve some sort of reward at the end other than the satisfaction of knowing the work itself is good.
Just to have something concrete to hold onto.