The last two days running around to shoot for the rum doc left me pretty exhausted today. That's kind of a good feeling though. Feeling exhausted generally means that you did a lot of a thing, and in this case, it was a satisfying thing.
The funny thing though is that it's not really physical exhaustion the way that I thought it was. I'm tired, but I don't think the fatigue is the result of all the running around and carrying heavy things. It's more mental than that. I'll be honest, doing interviews is super exhausting for me. It's not just all of the eye contact, which I assure you is part of it (#ASD), but I was after certain things that help tell what I think the story is. Getting that from people takes a lot of careful listening, empathy and trying to understand a personality on the fly. I'd like to think that I'm good at that, but it's a mental muscle I haven't used in a long time, probably in the early podcast years, easily 18 years ago. It's very taxing. After that, I did three hours of driving, which is also mentally expensive because driving in Florida.
So after work today, I was a certified couch potato. What might be a little different though is that I felt validated and justified to just sit around and watch TV. To be honest, this is normal behavior for me, but what has really changed in the last few years is my ability to be OK with the lethargy following intense activity. I don't know what it is about our culture that calls this "bad," but I'm deprogramming for that. The world tends to impose plenty of stress, and we don't need to add to it by beating ourselves up over arbitrary external expectations that we never agreed to.
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