The wall, the title, the future

I finally feel ready to write about what has happened to my career as an academic librarian. I couldn’t before because I had too much emotion tied up in the whole situation.

Basically, even though I knew that the job had burnt me out. There were internal causes for this burn-out for sure. There were things I could’ve changed in myself to make the job a better situation for me. But, there were more external causes for this burn-out, causes having to do with the institution I worked for.   I had evidence to this effect  that I could take out, lay on the table and look at (figuratively).

Even so, I felt a great burden of personal failure. If I had been better, stronger, more resilient, possessed a thicker skin… If I had been a better game player, more able to surf the waves of institutional politics… If I had been the bull that skewers the matador instead of the bull from that children’s book… the bull that prefers the smell of flowers over the smell of blood.

It’s been nearly two months since I tendered my resignation, though, and time has done its work. Each day away from that job and from my expectations for myself, and my disappointments and bitterness, makes it all fade a little more. Now I go through blocks of days where I don’t even think about the place, or my job, or my burn-out.

And when I do think of it, all I feel is relief.

I hit a wall. I didn’t bounce off it and walk back into battle again. I didn’t scale it. I went right through it, leaving a hole the shape of my body, just like the Coyote did, while chasing the Road Runner.

Now that I’ve quit, I need to make decisions about the future. I need an income. I need a plan. And my first step is to shed this word: Librarian.

I do not want to be a librarian. I am an Information Professional. Say it with me, In Fo May Shin Pro Fesh Innul.

Let’s go!

Eating coal and drinking urine, or Time to deal with it

Remember those two miners in China who survived a cave-in? The rescuers had given up on them, but the two guys kept going, eating coal and drinking urine.

And here I am, my leave is up, and I am torn up with emotional conflict because I feel I really can’t go back to my job. And surely this is ridiculous. It is a pleasant job. I am perfectly educated and experienced for the position. I get to use my MLIS and my subject master’s degree as well. I do not have to do things I find unpleasant - like clean toilets or work outside in cold and rain, or clean up biological waste and effluvia.

To help me get a grip on reality, I’ve been Internetting to find out what the world’s worst jobs are. I thought there’d be some UN report, or something from a NGO that works with the most misused workers of the world. Instead I kept finding ridiculous things like President of the United States, or the press secretary of the previous example, or anything to do with farting, armpit odor, or poo poo.
The Times chooses three jobs as the world’s worst, but it’s not serious. The choices would appeal to giggling elementary school children, and are written up as classified ads:

• Manually collecting semen from bulls, horses, sheep, and pigs
• Analyzing stool samples from dysentery victims
• Smelling and analyzing intestinal gas

Newsweek’s ariticle about a sewage worker in New Delhi, India is much more inspiring. Starting with a description of a young father who earns his tiny salary by entering sewers, nearly naked, and unclogging pipes by digging out the crap, bucket at a time. He has health problems from exposure to toxins and biological contaminants. Generations of people from his social caste have worked in the sewers. Death rate is high. Illness is high. Although protective equipment was purchased, the workers never received it… That’s a bad job. Dangerous, smelly, with rats and large cockroaches, wearing nothing but and undergarment covering your genital area…

I really have nothing to complain about.

Still, I have to call my boss today and I just don’t know what to say. Due back on Monday.

I guess I need to figure out why I feel I can’t go back. And is it a feeling that will pass? Or do I really think I’ve hit the end of my career as a librarian?

Was this the right thing to do?

According to an article on the Top 5 Myths About Workplace Stress, taking this LofA was a bad idea:

Most workplaces react to stress by reducing employees’ workloads, responsibilities or working hours and in serious cases by giving people long sick leaves… this is a mistake.

People hit by stress need to increase their capacity and confidence at work, and while time off from work can be necessary to treat the immediate symptoms of stress, a long absence from the workplace does exactly the opposite. When people return to the workplace, they’re even more vulnerable than before. Worse, some never return to work at all.

Instead, suggests the author, I should be working with my school and within myself to fix the things that feel so bad at work, for, as this article stresses, workplace stress is not caused by the work or amount of work, but how one feels about work. So, if you feel bad, you have to make the changes necessary to feel better.

It’s true, though, about feeling less confident and more fragile in some ways now that I’m on leave. As I said in the first post, I feel replaceable.

Week One Done; or Replaceable Me

I’ve finished the first seven days of my LofA from work (Leave of Absence).

The first few days were rough. I felt cast out from the tribe. I wandered the metaphorical desert, still sending emails to people at work, still trying to finish the unfinishable parade of tasks.

I worked hard the first few days, trying to impress people with how much I cared about the job so that I wouldn’t be forgotten, or fired, or unforgiven for that bad semester we just finished. Mostly, though, I wanted to not be proven to have that very quality that all of us know, deep down inside, that we posses: replaceableness.

As important as one might feel at any given job, very few, if any of us, are irreplaceable at our jobs. I am no exception. I valiantly tried to prove to myself and others that I was indeed important. I spent hours crafting careful emails recommending what to look for when hiring my temporary Replacement. I sent reminders and last minute thoughts and Oh, I forgot to tell you… emails to the library staff. But all my efforts were rewarded with silence (from the school administration in response to the emails about my Replacement) or silence (from the library staff, which resulted in me feeling like a foolish mother telling her 18 year old how to use the microwave as I rushed to the door, keys in hand, for my first vacation alone) or stiffly worded rebukes about this or that task I forgot to complete yet again (from the library staff sick of me and my bad semester, my falling-down semester, my semester of failure).

Eventually I stopped sending emails. I stopped wanting to check my work email at all. I was afraid to read more rebukes, afraid to see how many people the latest rebuke was CCd to, afraid of no new emails at all. One morning I asked my boyfriend to check my email for me, but he censored it too carefully and in frustration I took over.

By Friday, when I got a phone call from school I was ready to ignore it. Sure, I stopped what I was doing and listened to the voicemail as soon as it beeped its arrival on my cell, standing in the foyer at Safeway, the sliding doors opening and closing ahead of and behind me, like my own private Maxwell Smart corridor. It was HR telling me who they’d hired as my Replacement and carefully, as if talking to an hysteric, letting me know to call or email with any questions at all because they wanted to keep me in the loop.

But it was too late. I had untied the knot in the loop and slipped the slithery confines of caring. A big reason I needed to take a LofA was that I had grown to feel marginalized. More on that later. But a few days of my LofA had already been spent fretting over how much more marginalized I felt now that I was no longer reporting for duty, and I didn’t want to feel that nasty marginalization any more.

And this morning, first day of week two of my LofA, I am finally feeling cleanly detached enough to clean out my email box, unsubscribe from all my listservs, and set up my Vacation email notification. After I finish, I’ll do those few more tasks I put off, in a passive aggressive snit, last week, and be truly and welly done for another 5 weeks.

Hasta la vista, career.

image borrowed from http://flickr.com/photos/rock_alien/ through the Creative Commons License