My most recent flirt with my destructive mindset produced a few new ideas about myself that I hadn't considered in detail. And a few that I already knew fairly well.
I am apparently ridiculously weighted in favor of other people's praise. This is a bad thing in a profession where external praise is often limited to occasional comments, unless you hit the rockstar jackpot and have something published in a prominent publication.
Some part of this weighting might have to do with the time of the previous manager, whose name should be spoken only as a curse, and who I generally try not to interact with when she is in the branch as a user, least my resentment show through at how she tried to get me fired with at least one lie and several more uncharitable interpretations of mistakes. Because when you're afraid your manager is capricious, the way you fight back is with numbers and commentary.
Librarianship is increasingly a numbers game, using quantitative methods to try and classify a qualitative service. Circulation, attendance, door counts, and other statistics are all thrown together to try and determine whether the library is appropriately staffed, has sufficient budget, and is doing things the community finds meaningful. It's not completely a numbers game - my most popular programs for teens, basically a hangout and play games program, was killed twice, despite the numbers, because The Brass didn't approve of a program that didn't Do Something. While the building itself was having the issues that come from having too many teenagers in too little space. For the most part, however, numbers are becoming increasingly more important in determining things. And bad comments about you can be deadly, just like in other customer service jobs.
Librarianship is also a profession where badassery is required on a daily basis. The basic setup of the help desk is that you can provide information (or at least the beginning of a path to information) and recommendations to people on any topic they can conceive of, often on a short deadline. Then add in having to manage people when they are unruly, dispute your account of their due dates or fees, or are uninclined to follow policies and procedures (or, in at least one recent case, although not in my library system, attempting to burn the library branch down because their fines were not waived), pile on the expectation of regular programming, often on no budget, and then add on all the potential drama of a workplace and Management, all for a salary that can suck, and a big likelihood that you're employed part-time, so no benefits for you, and you have a public librarian. That's badass by itself.
Youth and teen librarianship, sometimes even more so. Because take everything above, add an often weekly or many-times weekly expectation for a stage show for the very youngest...and their parents, the knowledge that if children or teenagers are misbehaving, you will be expected to wade in and be the disciplinarian, summer reading programs, school visits, and up the difficulty of your information and recommendation requests with the added twist that you will be almost constantly working with incomplete, missing, or incorrect premises and information. And understand that your work, since so many youth librarians are women, will be discounted and assumed to be just a natural extension of being a woman (or that people will thank you for being a rare male in the profession).
There's a reason I'm only half-joking when I respond to people asking if they can do something for us with "Say all those nice things you said about us, but in writing, so I can give it to my supervisor."
So, yeah, business as usual is actually pretty impressive, not that people notice the use of the soft skills. And performing at a high level makes things that are impressive seem routine. Which means that when there is praise, it often seems undeserved, because it's "just" business as usual. Where the praise that I really want is from people in the profession, who know all the things and can compliment the whole thing. Or publish articles and/or posts about it. That, however, is into rockstar territory.
That's one part of Impostor Syndrome - there isn't enough meaningful praise from peers, supervisors, and other people who can appreciate the complexity of the work.
The other part is that the praise has to be unsolicited or it doesn't count. Which, um, yeah. There are a lot of librarians working alone - and others where it can seem that way. And my organization isn't exactly chatty about the compliments. So while going fishing for positive things often turns them up, it seems to cheapen the experience to have to ask.
That's work. Then there's home, and that's the actual reason for the title of this post. Holidays, for me, have always been about gathering friends and family together to share meals, stories, and camaraderie - to eat too much, make fun of things (sometimes each other in a general, good-natured way), and otherwise enjoy each other's company. I've been in my current location for many years now, but the local people I know are through work or through Significant Other...and they all have lives and aren't very local, so it's not very easy to call an Orphan's Feast, or to go up to someone else's house, because animals must be taken care of. And family is quite a ways away, so while there are contact methods, it's not the same.
So that leaves me in the un-enviable position of desiring lots of human contact for my holidays from among my friends, not having local friends to invite over, and so suffering the holidays.
Then there's the money concerns, which are always true and slightly more concerning around the holidays.
So if I admit that I don't have the holiday spirit...and haven't, for a while, now you know why.
Completely unrelated to this, if you want to spread good things about people,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kaberett is holding a place to give compliments, also called a love meme. My thread is in there, if you want, but there are also many others who could use it. Or nominate yourself or others.
I am apparently ridiculously weighted in favor of other people's praise. This is a bad thing in a profession where external praise is often limited to occasional comments, unless you hit the rockstar jackpot and have something published in a prominent publication.
Some part of this weighting might have to do with the time of the previous manager, whose name should be spoken only as a curse, and who I generally try not to interact with when she is in the branch as a user, least my resentment show through at how she tried to get me fired with at least one lie and several more uncharitable interpretations of mistakes. Because when you're afraid your manager is capricious, the way you fight back is with numbers and commentary.
Librarianship is increasingly a numbers game, using quantitative methods to try and classify a qualitative service. Circulation, attendance, door counts, and other statistics are all thrown together to try and determine whether the library is appropriately staffed, has sufficient budget, and is doing things the community finds meaningful. It's not completely a numbers game - my most popular programs for teens, basically a hangout and play games program, was killed twice, despite the numbers, because The Brass didn't approve of a program that didn't Do Something. While the building itself was having the issues that come from having too many teenagers in too little space. For the most part, however, numbers are becoming increasingly more important in determining things. And bad comments about you can be deadly, just like in other customer service jobs.
Librarianship is also a profession where badassery is required on a daily basis. The basic setup of the help desk is that you can provide information (or at least the beginning of a path to information) and recommendations to people on any topic they can conceive of, often on a short deadline. Then add in having to manage people when they are unruly, dispute your account of their due dates or fees, or are uninclined to follow policies and procedures (or, in at least one recent case, although not in my library system, attempting to burn the library branch down because their fines were not waived), pile on the expectation of regular programming, often on no budget, and then add on all the potential drama of a workplace and Management, all for a salary that can suck, and a big likelihood that you're employed part-time, so no benefits for you, and you have a public librarian. That's badass by itself.
Youth and teen librarianship, sometimes even more so. Because take everything above, add an often weekly or many-times weekly expectation for a stage show for the very youngest...and their parents, the knowledge that if children or teenagers are misbehaving, you will be expected to wade in and be the disciplinarian, summer reading programs, school visits, and up the difficulty of your information and recommendation requests with the added twist that you will be almost constantly working with incomplete, missing, or incorrect premises and information. And understand that your work, since so many youth librarians are women, will be discounted and assumed to be just a natural extension of being a woman (or that people will thank you for being a rare male in the profession).
There's a reason I'm only half-joking when I respond to people asking if they can do something for us with "Say all those nice things you said about us, but in writing, so I can give it to my supervisor."
So, yeah, business as usual is actually pretty impressive, not that people notice the use of the soft skills. And performing at a high level makes things that are impressive seem routine. Which means that when there is praise, it often seems undeserved, because it's "just" business as usual. Where the praise that I really want is from people in the profession, who know all the things and can compliment the whole thing. Or publish articles and/or posts about it. That, however, is into rockstar territory.
That's one part of Impostor Syndrome - there isn't enough meaningful praise from peers, supervisors, and other people who can appreciate the complexity of the work.
The other part is that the praise has to be unsolicited or it doesn't count. Which, um, yeah. There are a lot of librarians working alone - and others where it can seem that way. And my organization isn't exactly chatty about the compliments. So while going fishing for positive things often turns them up, it seems to cheapen the experience to have to ask.
That's work. Then there's home, and that's the actual reason for the title of this post. Holidays, for me, have always been about gathering friends and family together to share meals, stories, and camaraderie - to eat too much, make fun of things (sometimes each other in a general, good-natured way), and otherwise enjoy each other's company. I've been in my current location for many years now, but the local people I know are through work or through Significant Other...and they all have lives and aren't very local, so it's not very easy to call an Orphan's Feast, or to go up to someone else's house, because animals must be taken care of. And family is quite a ways away, so while there are contact methods, it's not the same.
So that leaves me in the un-enviable position of desiring lots of human contact for my holidays from among my friends, not having local friends to invite over, and so suffering the holidays.
Then there's the money concerns, which are always true and slightly more concerning around the holidays.
So if I admit that I don't have the holiday spirit...and haven't, for a while, now you know why.
Completely unrelated to this, if you want to spread good things about people,
kaberett is holding a place to give compliments, also called a love meme. My thread is in there, if you want, but there are also many others who could use it. Or nominate yourself or others.
