empathy exploration

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I’ve been saying sorry a lot this week. It’s the first week of teaching of term 3, and I’m feeling stretched to my limit. Just when one email gets answered about showing a film in class tomorrow, another one comes in from someone who has only just started putting their course resources together and needs help with the software Right This Minute. The students are waiting! Assignments rely on the content! Project work that I have barely kept up with over August is still happening, still asking things of me that I have not finished (and in some cases not started). And I have a welcome presentation that I need to get slides done for. And through all this is the sorry – trying to communicate my busy-ness and just holding on without coming across as pitying. But I am overwhelmed! And I do want people’s empathy! And patience! 

This is all to say that I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what has worked and what hasn’t, and give myself the space to stop saying sorry and feel like I am enough. At least for the length of a blog post if not for the rest of the day. 

*checks email one more time to make sure nothing new has caught on fire* 

What has worked?

I have left on time every day this week. Last week I worked 9 hours every day and then called in sick on Friday because I just couldn’t. I knew that if I did that again this week I would cry on the way to work every day. So I have left no later than my due 7 or 8 hours. And not checked any email outside of work time – there is only so much I can do away from my desk and occupying more of my free time with anxiety is not helping. 

I booked leave for the coming weeks. I knew I would need to use up all this time in lieu I had been building up, but that it wouldn’t happen unless I scheduled it. So I booked in that time and some bonus annual leave days for some shorter weeks coming up that don’t rely on me calling in sick from exhaustion. 

I walked for at least 20 minutes every day. One day it was a long lunch. Yesterday I got off the train 1 stop early and walked home. The sun has just come out so today I think it’s another lunchtime walk. There’s nothing worse than being tired and drained but not being able to sleep when you actually get into bed – and for me that means I need some movement in my day but I have to fight for that time. I have to put it in my calendar and not think of it as optional or movable. 

What hasn’t worked?

I’ve been eating pretty poorly. Food will always be really hard for me. I know this is meant to be a professional space that I am cultivating but I don’t really know the point of that unless you can also let people be people. So I have food issues and stress brings them painfully to the fore. Today I am trying to get back on track by not focusing on it too much, and making a lot of better options for me available at hand. We’ll see how I go. 

Sleep. It’s so hard to know how much I actually need when 8 hours never feels like enough. But then I think about it a bit more and really the 8 hours was whittled down pretty significantly by laying in bed composing emails in my head I didn’t have time to send, the cat waking me up at 2 and then at 4, and then waking up before my alarm. Now that there is more light as we head into Spring properly, I think I need to wake up earlier as earlier routines have helped with getting a more solid sleep in. 

This last one is the weirdest one to write and share yet, but I have been thinking about it a lot and it will be something to keep working on as I don’t have a good answer to what to do about it. I was so overwhelmed on Monday that I cried (quite a lot) in front of my direct manager at the end of our regular catch up meeting. It was one of those cries that I just could not stop once it started – all the more because this manager was being nice to me and trying her hardest to comfort me. I was just at the end of my rope for the day and tired of pretending that I was okay and on top of things. I don’t know how to be truthful about this to any of the managers here. That our workloads are just so huge and sometimes that sucks in a way that you can’t fix with a to-do list. No amount of prioritising work helps when you have regular stuff pop up out of the blue that can and will derail what you could be working on at any time. Or when we are meant to be constantly developing ourselves in our profession, staying current and cutting edge, learning new skills, and also answering our phone whenever it rings. So this is a big WIP for me – knowing how to communicate that treading water is tiring and not getting so bogged down in how much there is to do that I can’t focus on any one thing to get done. 

Hazy sunset before the rain set in

I set myself a timer to write this – and it’s almost up. It does help to get things down, and I hope I won’t regret the overshare. But it’s so painful not to share. I want a space to grow and reflect and share but I know I will have to crowbar it in to my life to really get it working. There will be time and space for more reflection, and more writing in general, if I make time and space for posts like this. Done is better than perfect. 

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Well I’ve got to start somewhere. This is much more awkward than I was anticipating.

I cribbed the title of this blog from the Leslie Jamison book The Empathy Exams: Essays, but more specifically from this quote:

“Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”

Sorry to get literal but I imagine I will be using my #skydiary to illustrate this blog quite often

I’m a library professional who really quibbles with the stereotype/popular culture caricature of the Librarian who is a dowdy middle-aged woman who reads all day behind a big oak desk, shushing all noise from the patrons who she has open disdain for. I think that information work is empathy work – that every day in GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) we not only acknowledge the extending horizon of the context of our collections, but we work to connect people to that extending horizon, and actively encourage the building work required in shaping that horizon. Yes Library work is people work, and  yes we still need librarians and all kinds of information professionals to help us find things that Google can’t.

I’ve had my qualification to be a capital ‘L’ Librarian for 5 years now, and I have craved a semi-formal writing practice and space for awhile now. I work as a liason-type librarian in an academic tertiary institution and so much of this job is about staying on top of various trends – information, publishing, metics, funding, and we don’t always have our own personal spaces for reflection. I also read professional blogs by other GLAM folks when I get a spare 15 minutes at work and I have found them to be equal parts informative and comforting, and I want to see what happens if I add my voice to the ring. I think of myself as having something to say – I have been creating content online most of my life at this point. But it’s going to be a fun pivot to try and change the haphazard and largely unplanned way I put things out into the World Wide Web into something that is worth sharing with people, or at the very least looking back on myself. I mean that is the end goal – to be able to point people I meet in my library life to something that I have set up that isn’t just my contact details on an institutional webpage. And to have other people reading this – to feel a part of the online community of all kinds of information and cultural workers. I’m also about to begin a Masters after being out of the study game for as long as I’ve been working and I need all the writing experience I can get. I don’t have much more to say just yet as a personal intro – mostly because I’m still trying to gauge how out there I am going to be, but I think a good place to start would be to show some love to the blogs I read myself.

Three blogs I read on the job in those rare 15 minutes between meetings and talking to Library users (and some recommended posts from each):  

If you read and Library or adjacent blogs already, you are probably reading Lissertations/Alissa’s blog. I have been a quiet admirer for a long time though so I couldn’t not include a link in this mini blog round-up. I opened this post up with some of my frustrations with the way librarianship is perceived – and Alissa’s blog runs on a similar theme but with one of the most misunderstood and maligned parts of librarianship: cataloguing. This is the topic in libraries that a lot of librarians are guilty of misunderstanding – often to their own (and their patrons or users!) detriment. But understanding not just how are information systems currently work, but also their (often pretty shady) history is so important to this job. I am already going to break my own rules and link to two posts from Alissa that really stick out to me personally about the kinds of connections between the history of a system and how it impacts users in beguiling and sometimes upsetting ways Cataloguing Trauma and Indigenous names in authority records: the case of Jandamarra.

First off – this is the best title of any blog out there, no competition. I came to reading the work of Chris Bourg I think through the #critlib tag on Twitter – and although she doesn’t update as frequently anymore the archives of this blog are really deep and rich. So many posts feel timeless and important to me such as The unbearable whiteness of librarianship and when words matter despite them being situated in/connected to specific events. I strive to balance my voice as well as Chris does between critical analysis and interpersonal connection to what is going on – hopefully without being too much of a copycat of course.

I’ve been reading Sara Ahmed since my time as an undergrad, and I think as valuable as librarian specific blogs are to me I also try and read work from the ‘the academy’ more widely as well. It amazes me that someone who is writing… quite a lot of books? Like sometimes as many as once a year – has time to also write blog posts that are often seering commentary on current events/discourses in academia. I will always remember Ahmed’s response to the outcrys about using trigger warnings in academia and how ready people are to say students are the cause of the problem when they respond appropriately to the pretty rough world we work, teach, and try to live in: “So much violence is justified and repeated by how those who refuse to participate in violence are judged. We need to make a translation. The idea that being over-sensitive is what stops us from addressing difficult issues can be translated as: we can’t be racist because you are too sensitive to racism.” Right on. Another searing and more recent post I would recommend is Queer use.

And maybe to top it off/have something to hold myself accountable to Three topics I would like to delve into in future posts:

  • A deeper dive into archives and affect – with some help/specific reference to the ‘Crying in the Archives’ by Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath and sections from the ‘An Archive of Feelings’ by  Ann Cvetkovich
  • Why Don’t Academic Libraries Have Access To A Freakin’ E-Book Platform for Novels, or Why I Still Make My Library Buy Paper Books And Will Keep Getting In Trouble For It I Guess
  • Florilegia: collections of text fragments from what I’m reading