If someone were to ask you to assign value to the sense of feeling comfortable in your own skin, relaxed in your surroundings, and content in knowing that people understand your intentions and motivations, as you walk through the world, could you? I mean, it’s not like there’s a word or a monetary amount you can assign to that level of...ease.
Personally, the image I think of is when I return to America after being abroad. Once I’m back in the States, I no longer need to try and map out each sentence I attempt to speak in a foreign language. I no longer worry if I’ve offended anyone by stepping on a local custom, or if people are making assumptions about whether I’m one of those “ugly” Americans. I feel like I’m home again. It was nice to visit a foreign land, but I’m back to a place where it’s easy to crack jokes, tell someone exactly what I need/want/feel, and can assume that the person I’m talking to has some very fundamental things in common with me.
But what if I had no baseline country/community/social group I could always return to after venturing out into a place where I was so different from everyone else? What if I was constantly in a foreign country where I never mastered the language? I’d be on edge all the time. Communicating with people would be exhausting. I would second-guess every sentence I uttered every single day of the week, wondering if I the joke I made actually sounded funny, or whether I offended somebody simply by commenting on how I thought the day was going. I’m pretty certain what I would feel would be endless anxiety.
Or how about this thought exercise?
What if you were simply hanging out in the community you grew up in, not traveling anywhere, just trying to make a friend here and there. You try a lot at first, because we all seek connections with other humans. But as you face more misunderstandings, more negative reactions to your attempts to talk to people about your interests and hobbies, more eye rolling and cold shoulders when you start quoting your favorite scene from your favorite movie ever, or perhaps have a “unique” response to a particular sensory input….you try to connect with people less and less. You might have gotten away with more when you were younger, but now that you’re growing facial hair…people just don’t want to bother with you anymore. And you don’t bother either, because consistent rejection and misunderstandings are exhausting.
In contrast, when you arrive at A Farm Less Ordinary, you are welcome to “let your freak flag fly” – within reason, of course! Even though you might essentially live in a foreign country during the rest of your life, when you work on the farm, you are accepted, welcomed, humored and respected. And if we can’t always understand exactly what you mean, we try really, really hard to understand the gist of it. And we won’t reject you, tease you, or dismiss you for being different.
Can you imagine how freeing that might be? For our Growers, that means that they can let their shoulders down, breathe more freely, and maybe even make some friends. We all have some sort of disability here, and we own it. We’re not embarrassed or afraid to talk about it. We embrace our disabilities, our weirdness. We focus on what we can do, and work around or through those things we can’t yet do.
At A Farm Less Ordinary, we are a community. Everyone’s welcome. And while you’re here, you can learn a few things and earn some money. That’s a pretty good deal, right?
