Getting My Own Goat
Four years ago I resigned from The Belmont Goats due to exhaustion and burnout initially prompted by a post-diagnosis job placement a year earlier. For the first time since, I’m struggling with not having one of my old responsibilities.
This year it’s the organization’s tenth anniversary. (Technically I think the first two goats in the herd landed in the original field for which the nonprofit is named in December 2012.) To this day, I think that one of the things I did best for the project, except near the end of my tenure, was run its social media.
For weeks now I’ve felt myself growing antsy, as I’ve thought about all the things they could do over the course of this year. During a recent transition at the organization, I did quietly ask who was taking over their social but didn’t say anything about why I’d asked.
The duty’s been claimed, of course, but this is where my worry-brain has been taking over, because I know nothing of the person, and so I don’t know if they just want to be the one posting cute photos of goats or if they understand that doing social media for a nonprofit takes real effort. It can be fun and light-hearted but it’s not play.
At this point there’s only one person even involved at the nonprofit anymore who was around in 2013. Just one eyewitness, and they’re not involved in the social media side of things.
I’m not going to lie: lately hyperfocus and special interests have taken over and I’ve pages of notes detailing what I’d do over the course of the year to tell the 10th-anniversary story. I’d tried simply to exorcise the thoughts by writing them out once, but it became this whole other thing I can’t stop obsessing over.
Had the social responsibilities not been claimed, I’d have floated the idea of me stepping in for the rest of the year during the anniversary, but since it’s already been covered I couldn’t bring myself to say anything.
I’m left, then, with the usual: I have to try to further exorcise the obsession by writing it all out in public. Something I’m sure I must have done before in twenty years of blogging.
I wish I had a better memory, because I’d love to know if doing this actually works.
Addenda
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That said, later I did manage to ghostwrite this unsolicited post for them.
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For reasons I won’t go into here, eventually I did end up sending a thing I’d written as part of my attempted self-exorcism.