Snowflake Challenge 2022 #1-#2: May Your Heart Be Your Guiding Key

[silveradept]

snowflake_challenge is indeed happening again this year.

Challenge #1 was to get your housekeeping on, make sure your profiles are up to date and your sticky posts are stickied (and also, this is a good time for you to update or create a transformative works policy for your work, so that it's much easier for people to know whether or not it's okay to record your things, remix them, or otherwise, or whether you want them not to do so at all. Not everyone is on good enough terms with the people that you want to remix to be able to ask them.)

Since there wasn't anything major that needed updating, there wasn't a post for #1. #2, on the other hand, asks for something that requires an output.

In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

Goals and resolutions are a fraught thing for many people in regular years. In these pandemic-powered years where everything is still disrupted and a return to something that doesn't require constant vigilance is still a very long way away, the idea of setting goals or trying to work toward something other than "survive, by whatever means are available" seems like foolish thinking.

Fannish goals usually move in questions of words counted or works created, things brought off the pile of the WIP and into completion. Perhaps some amount, also, of getting through the backlog that appears every time of things to be read or watched or otherwise experienced, sometimes before the subscription disappears or the thing itself disappears from the subscription services.

Non-fannish goals might mean finding a new position, finding a better place to trade labor for wages, being more present for children, finding a better work-life balance, or, as best as is possible, trying to avoid getting caught out by the virus that continues to rage around.

For me, many of these things are less goals and more maintenance matters. I have reached the top of my pay scale, and going further up the power chain in my organization means going into management, and I do not have the proper disposition for management.

I already have a professional speaking engagement lined up for this year, which is a carryover from the last year when the conference went virtual in the face of a renewed variant arriving. If I wanted to aim for a bigger organization for speaking at, I'd probably also have to shell out a significant amount of money for the membership, and frankly, that organization has yet to convince me that they're moving in the correct direction on issues that are important to me and mine. A chapter that I wrote and got through the editing process is going to be published this year. Possibly also a conversation and reflection that I had, too. There's a good chance I'm going to pen something this year with the intent of getting it published somewhere, even if "somewhere" is the quarterly journal of the state library association, even if I don't know what it is yet.

A coworker complimented me at the year-end sharing about how I've gotten better at contributing to things instead of passing on them out of self-consciousness about lack of skill. A lot of that has come from doing programming that's intended to showcase a process, rather than a product, and another part of it comes from finally feeling secure enough in my position and my situation that I can be more okay with things not being perfect and more doing and laughing along with the kids, like the way it should be. I haven't yet made it to the point where I feel confident that the things I create, or the ideas I have, will be accepted or are good ideas, despite the many acceptances that I've had so far. The profession is still built pretty hard on the idea of rockstars and Movers and Shakers, who are almost always upper managers or people who have dealt with extraordinary situations, and doesn't really do enough to acknowledge the "you're all competent, and doing a good job, even if you haven't done crisis management or had a brilliant new program that needed to coordinate six different nonprofits into the library space." I kind of want a Slow and Steady award to accompany the Mover and Shaker award, for people who have just been solid and dependable people over their career, not necessarily with all the flashy stuff, but always providing the best service that they can.

I also want things like the Slow and Steady award because it's becoming more and more apparent, as the virus rages on and makes the missing stairs and gaps in the social safety net too obvious to ignore, that there are a lot of people who believe the library's purpose is not to know where the social safety net is and how to get people into it, but to provide all aspects of it when those parts are nonexistent or have been cut or underfunded from the places that should be providing those social services. And many libraries go along with this because the people proposing one more thing to be added to their plates (without any additional budget, of course) are usually the people who control the budget and its allocations, so the library can't exactly refuse them without the strong possibility of reprisal.

It's also becoming clearer that what used to be a couple of people with fringe beliefs trying to demand that the library cater to their view of the world is actually a deep-seated organized effort to control what is acceptable to express or do, even in the privacy of the library's collection or their own homes, and if they don't already have people who agree with them in positions of power, they're trying to put them there. Goals for this upcoming year might be to fight the action to hold position and give as little ground as possible to people who have the worst ideas in mind for everyone.

Fannishly, based on how last year went, I think that while I will continue to seek out interesting exchanges, challenges, and prompts, I may have found that my fannish capacity is full up and won't fit much more into it that isn't filling a gap left by an exchange stopping. It might have to do with the additional cognitive load that comes with living in these times, but sometimes the words don't come out quite as easy as they used to. I'm still only trying to offer things that I feel that I can write, so I haven't had to pull out of a thing yet, but sometimes I can hear the bears coming after me. I don't know what my goals would be, other than maintenance of the things that I'm already doing. Which, because they're maintenance, I lose the perspective of whether they're Spiders Georg type of things or whether they're things that everyone else does, nothing special. Is this about to crash kinds of levels, or is this healthy and sustainable? I don't know, and it seems like the way I'll find out is when I crash.

Getting rid of the consequences of my previous bad decisions is something that makes monthly progress, and so long as I stay employed, that goal will happen on time. I don't have an epic WIP to be finished that I have the idea of how to do and just need to actually do it. I have responsibilities, and those responsibilities want as little disruption to their plans as needed. Work is still in a holding pattern, of sorts, and I'm trying not to take on overwork there, or declare that this is the year I make it into the pages of Library Journal as the best librarian ever. (It won't happen.) They want our goals to be S.M.A.R.T., after all. I finished the Grief last year, the culmination of six years of work and started on a different project that's much less good quality than the original was, but is also something I read when I was younger. Does it count as a goal to go "I don't want anything to get worse, when it seems pretty clear that it's going to get worse for a lot of us?"

Still, I feel like I should be able to summon something to strive for in this year. Something like finally starting and sticking with a spiritual practice, which would be easier to do if I had a thought in my head about what such a practice might entail and where to look for more information about it. (The gathering of information part is doing better than it has in previous years. It's also hampered by the not having people close to each other part.) Being able to let go more about the need for perfection, and to unwork the part of me that's convinced making mistakes will result in the greatest catastrophe immediately. To write all the words that need writing to get all the assignments, exchanges, and prompts done, and to keep having fun doing it. Perhaps this year will be the year where I play more games and worry less about what the results are. I don't know. I always have trouble thinking that far ahead at this point in the year anyway.

I looked at last year's goal: To be the best person that I can be, to celebrate them when they are awesome, and to find a way of making them better when they're not. That still seems like an applicable goal for this year. Past that, to get all my exchanges and prompts in on time without defaults. That's what I aim for every year, but it's probably worth mentioning to myself that last year, that meant a total output of 27 works to AO3 of more than 100k of words, plus the incidentals, one-offs, 3 Sentence Ficathon, linkdumps, December Days, Snowflake and Sunshine Challenges, the weekly commentary read, and any other things that I wrote that didn't track quite as easily for wordcount. Add on to something like not dropping the ball on being a professional librarian and making sure that I contribute what I can to the upkeep of the house and the household and that's probably got the calendar full up before thinking about anything that I might do for myself to recharge.

And yet, I kind of want to explore a place like the Fediverse and get to understand it better, but I'm stuck being afraid that the first choice will be wrong, even though I know that it's entirely possible to pull up stakes and move, if necessary. Suggestions welcome. I want to be able to dream bigger about what my organization can do, even as I also need to be able to catalog all the reasons why that's a much bigger ask than it appears to be, and to be ready to hear not just "no," but "yes, but that's a three year project to get all the approvals necessary and the resources in place."

So I guess I do have goals for this year, but how many of them are going to have tangible end products? I haven't a clue. And I guess that's why I feel like I have trouble with goals.