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[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#9: "I can make changes in my organization."
One of the worst things that happens to anyone who has finished their library school training is while they have the tools and the perspective to see their organizations from outside angles and to bring useful solutions and new ways of thinking to new problems and intractable ones, their organizations insist on wasting that potential by hammering all of that outside perspective and new knowledge out of them so they can instead learn how the organization has always done things, will continue to do things, and how things get done in the bureaucracy, so you know whose permission you have to obtain before even beginning the legwork toward doing something and how likely it is that someone in one of the managerial level above you will decide to crush it. (If you're lucky, they might even explain why.)
( And it happened to me, too. )
This is not a happy story, because it's basically a story of failure and blockading and a neurodivergent person looking at things, having a possible solution, asking if we can implement it, and being told "no" for reasons that don't always end up in the "okay, that's fair" column. And that's with things that I've been trying to do that are ultimately on the less important end, because there are other possible ways of obtaining technology or putting in programming. For the people who have been trying to get the organization to change their culture to be better at providing good working environments for non-white colleagues, for non-cis colleagues, they not only have to deal with the fundamental conservatism, but all of the additional problems that come from dealing with a profession that is primarily white women, and with a lot of white women in positions of leadership. They probably have long since stopped believing in the statement that they can make change entirely. Yet nobody seems to think of that as the major condemnation that it is.
#9: "I can make changes in my organization."
One of the worst things that happens to anyone who has finished their library school training is while they have the tools and the perspective to see their organizations from outside angles and to bring useful solutions and new ways of thinking to new problems and intractable ones, their organizations insist on wasting that potential by hammering all of that outside perspective and new knowledge out of them so they can instead learn how the organization has always done things, will continue to do things, and how things get done in the bureaucracy, so you know whose permission you have to obtain before even beginning the legwork toward doing something and how likely it is that someone in one of the managerial level above you will decide to crush it. (If you're lucky, they might even explain why.)
( And it happened to me, too. )
This is not a happy story, because it's basically a story of failure and blockading and a neurodivergent person looking at things, having a possible solution, asking if we can implement it, and being told "no" for reasons that don't always end up in the "okay, that's fair" column. And that's with things that I've been trying to do that are ultimately on the less important end, because there are other possible ways of obtaining technology or putting in programming. For the people who have been trying to get the organization to change their culture to be better at providing good working environments for non-white colleagues, for non-cis colleagues, they not only have to deal with the fundamental conservatism, but all of the additional problems that come from dealing with a profession that is primarily white women, and with a lot of white women in positions of leadership. They probably have long since stopped believing in the statement that they can make change entirely. Yet nobody seems to think of that as the major condemnation that it is.
