Mordēre – On Being Back

I am struggling to put words to last year. I would like to try and write a more substantial professional reflection at some point, but to be honest at the end of my first week back the overwhelming feeling is one of continuation. I gave myself two mini-goals this week to help ease back into things though, read one article each day and put it into some kind of round-up post to resurrect my blog. I have dreaded even logging back in but here I am and here is a post. I’ll punctuate with some pictures from my (almost) daily walks that I am still trying to fit in even though Summer is really testing my resolve on that front.

A garden I walk past in my neighbourhood with a number of beautiful flowering plants and shrubs, with the distinct cone shaped pale pink echinacea blossoms in the middle of the shot. The grass is green and lush to the right of the shot, and the mailbox is visible in the top left of the shot.
Admiring some neighbourhood echinacea.

Accepting the hard stuff by Graham Panther

I am a huge fan of the Big Feels Club, and of the peer support model for mental health at large. I started going to therapy regularly again last year, actually for the first time in my life before things got to a crisis point, rather than the point where everything has fallen apart and I am a few sleepless nights from needing to be in hospital. But last year I felt the threat of being dragged under and managed to make an appointment before I was crushed in the undertow, which feels like a huge achievement all on its own. I really think reflections such as this one from Graham really helped me get to that place. Therapy for me has always been an important process of externalization – emptying my head to an impartial party who will every now and then offer some insight. There are so many things that are potentially there for the big feeler in a therapy setting, and it also has a hell of a lot of shortcomings. I can’t recommend the podcast No Feeling Is Final by Graham and his partner Honor Eastly if you would like some insight into what a mental health breakdown and recovery(ish) can look like in the Australian healthcare system, and why in general ‘just asking for help’ isn’t actually that useful for a lot of us. This is something really huge that I would love to talk about more, especially with my specific connections made to working in the library world and being depressed and anxious and often interacting with extremely stressed and anxious people, but I’ll give that topic some of its own posts when I have more time to dedicate to it.

A shot of the Maroubra headland taken from Malabar Head at sunset. There is some bush visible in the bottom of the photo, the ocean takes up the middle of the shot, there is a strip of the coast with the evening lights starting to come on in the foreground, and then the rest of the shot is made up of the pale dusk sky.
The view from Malabar Head of Maroubra.

In the Catalogue by Vanessa Berry

“With every object I inspected I came up against a point of restraint of some kind. It had happened when I opened the envelope to see the hair net folded delicately around the tissue paper, and when I touched the sample of corduroy, experiencing in my gesture an echo of how others would have done the same. In such moments I become aware of the collapse and expanse of time”.

Embodiment and archivy are a particularly juicy match and Vanessa Berry always gives live to forgotten corners of our world. I’m a huge fan of Vanessa’s work so it has been thrilling to see her work on the Dictionary of Sydney partnering up with the State Library of New South Wales. GLAMR and Zine worlds colliding, as if they have ever been able to be fully separate anyway. I was especially creeped out by the hairnet that sparks the start of this article boasting ‘Made from Human Hair’, but it is entirely false to think of any object in an archive as being able to be severed from its all-too-human origins.

The grassy front yard of an apartment building with crested pigeons and rainbow lorikeets eating together next to a water bowl that has been set out for them.
Snack time with friends.

Plan S launches, but will it drive down publisher fees? By Jack Grove

Not only is Open Access anything always big news in library world, Plan S has definitely been something a lot of people are hanging their hats on in Australia. To be honest I haven’t been able to entirely understand why. This latest update seems to indicate that Article Processing Fees are not going to be reducing in a meaningful way despite pressure and transparency revealing that the biggest journals are going to continue to butt up against the attempts to change the funding models attached to them. I do appreciate that this article highlights that as usual, researching under capitalism will always hold making money much higher over making knowledge accessible. Or as University Librarian for Brigham Young is quoted in the article – “As long as it’s more desirable to publish in some journals than in others, competitive pressures will drive prices up for the desired ones”.

A wattle tree in bloom, covered in bright yellow flowers.
Always looking out for wattle.

Your Life’s Work by Eda Günaydın

You might think I have chosen a pretty wild mix of stuff here, but that’s what happens when you open a browser after being on break for 3 weeks and start to try and clear out some of the tabs in earnest. I think this piece captures not only something really distinctive about the nature of work (maybe especially as a millennial, but definitely as someone supposedly working their dream job who is often caught telling people about how much it still sucks)  but also weirdly prophetically about the particular drudgery that work has been under COVID. Take this passage for instance: 

“In these mediated realities, everything is both real and fake. Or, more accurately, these categories collapse and become moot because they are subordinated to a more important classification: everything is work, regardless of its real or fake status. We no longer have a ‘work voice’ and ‘work outfit’ and a real, authentic self. Our authentic selves have become what is on offer, which means that we work nonstop”.

One of the most difficult things for me personally about last year, and about how I thought I would magically feel differently in the new year despite many things still being the same or worse, is that my work self and my not work self kind of collapsed. I know I’m in the shit when I wake up before my alarm, and lie in bed composing emails I know I need to get up and send, which used to only happen when I was facing particularly busy weeks at the library. This tends to happen a few times a week during work from home, compounded by my pandemic anxiety making it both more difficult to fall asleep and night and impossible to get back to sleep if I do wake up during the night or early morning. Maybe some people would question the necessity of the existence of ‘an authentic self’ but to them I would try and describe just how bleak it has felt to have those selves collapse as I barely left my house and my work space was about 10 steps away from my bed since March 2020. And I don’t really think that feeling is resolved by being forced back into the office when there is still community transmission (as what is potentially happening next week at my place of work), but ironically voicing deep anxieties and fears like that are pretty taboo at work, even while my most authentic self is being demanded provide support to students and staff.

I didn’t quite make it to one article a day, but damn I got close! I often insist that Librarians do not have the luxury of being able to sit around and read all day, and maybe I am undoing some of that by choosing to share what I have read on and off the clock this week. I think I am trying to make the point that, at most, even in this ‘quiet period’ of the year, I get the chance to read about 1 article a day. Even when I am making a concerted effort to keep on top of my professional development, I am finding that the business-as-usual work still finds me and interrupts me. Especially with the pandemic damaging my already fragile attention span. I think it would help me immensely to find some time to reflect and write about the bigger things from the last year or so, like online events that would otherwise be accessible, supporting lonely students, accessibility and online content creation, being okay with progressing professionally without actually always trying to change jobs, but to also try and cultivate a smaller and more frequent practice of reflecting and sharing. Even if it’s just sharing a few articles when I haven’t been able to make time to find the words for anything else.