December Days 2022 #8: Conscientious
Dec. 8th, 2022 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[What's December Days this year? Taking a crowdsourced list of adjectives and seeing if I can turn them into saying good things about myself. Or at least good things to talk about.]
There is conscientiousness that comes from having variable attention stimulus traits. It becomes part of the system to do things as soon after they have been asked or assigned, so as not to give the opportunity for the brain to file it away and then forget about it until reminded by a later stimulus. Or to commit the thing to an external memory device, whether paper or phone, so that it will provide a reminder and allow for successful completion of a task. It's not great when those systems still fail and something slips through the cracks, or when I think, in complete contradiction to everything that's happened before, that I might succeed at remembering this one thing this one time, even though I will probably have several other things asked of me that I will do in between when the thing is asked of me and when I have time to complete it. When you are governed by a brain that drops tasks that won't give it the stimulation it wants, no matter how necessary they are, you start having to become conscientious about how you interact with the world. And you quickly develop a way of asking forgiveness when things don't go according to plan (usually with self-recrimination and shame about having failed at something that should be easier than it actually is.)
There are other times where, because of that same variable attention stimulus trait, all of my conscientious goes out the window, and instead frustrating things get broken, or my patience evaporates completely, or I perceive someone's signs of anxiety as a personal slight that I am not moving fast enough, eveen though I am trying to fix the situation as quickly as I can. And if I could have the presence of mind to analyze those things and recognize them for what they are, things would go better. It's extra aggravation at times because it feels like I can control that part of me better at work than at home, but if I stop and think about it, work usually doesn't produce the same kind of situations where I would snap at someone because they are standing on all of my buttons at once and berating me for not having intuited what they want and delivered it to them before they had to talk to me. (My ex was terrible about a lot of things, but one of the things she was most consistently terrible about was not giving direction about how she wanted things done, to the point where I stopped trying to do anything that she hadn't given explicit instructions on how to do. I probably annoyed her by asking for those things all the time, but she brought it on herself by not explaining things until after I'd tried to do them in a way that made sense to me and appeared to produce the result she wanted. [There's two stories here that I would tell in the correct company to illustrate the communication problems we had here.]
When I'm feeling upset with myself over shortcomings and faults, dropped memory balls or undone tasks become "no person should trust me with anything at all, because I'll forget" and emotional dysregulation becomes "nobody should be a friend of mine or love me, because I lack the control to avoid turning into a big ball of anger at a moment's notice. Better for me to have no people around me that I could heart until I learn how to control myself properly." They're not spoken as cries for attention or for drama. They're sincere, conscientious beliefs with the well-being of others in mind. (After all, who wants another source of potential trauma and upset in their lives?) Yes, if that happened, I'd be miserable, because I'd be chasing perfection and losing all my friends at the first sign of a slip-up, which would make me even more miserable. But when those thoughts come around, I do believe them and think it would be better for everyone else to distance themselves from me until I can learn how to function like a normal person. (Right about now is where someone points out that "normal" people are really pretty screwy themselves.)
The second definition is one that pulls fairly strongly at me, although perhaps not as stongly if my situation were one of autism rather than variable attention. Despite the researchers choosing to pathologize the result, it turns out, at least in one study, autistics were much more conscientious and consistent in their moral stances. It is easy to have principled stances when those stances are coming from behind a keyboard, and much more difficult when they come into contact with other people. But I have also spent a fair amount of my career as someone who will step up to the plate for teenagers in the library, because they're important, and who can demonstrate that teenagers will come to the library for programming options if they get the opportunity. I may not be the best about maintaining professional distance and being an authority figure first, but it was better for the teens that someone was seeing them as something other than nuisances that needed to be kicked out and who could understand, if imperfectly, about the phase of life they were in and what kinds of decisions they might make in certain situations. With the presence of a teen librarian in my location, rather than just nebulously part of the system, that part of my career is coming to a close. What's replacing it seems to be ideas about improving the institution as a whole and trying to get my own specific institution to improve itself greatly in light of the amount of wisdom being dropped on us by researchers and by those brave enough to speak up where I can listen in about the experiences of people who don't look like me with libraries. Ideas on improvement have always been a part of me, but they're coming out more and more in publications and articles and presentations at this point than direct suggestions to our administration or using the only officially sanctioned channel to make suggestions with. (Mostly because my administration seems to believe that any genuine effort to have these conversations in any sort of public space where people can participate needs to be crushed immediately. Which is still consistent with the way that the ideas I had bounding into a system with my fresh-out-of-graduate-school perspective were shunted aside, told they were out of my scope, and otherwise shut down instead of supported. I'm just seeing it better now with time and perspective.) I have, for better or worse, embraced the ethos of pretending I am a mediocre white man and proceeding with the confidence of the same when it comes to submitting ideas and proposals for talks, and many of those proposals have borne fruit and I've been able to present them or have them published (for the admittedly limited audiences that my works reach.)
I think a fair amount of my library and librarian ethics are heterodox to the ones of my institution and of the national organization, and I am okay with that. I think many of those institutional ethics are supremely invested in the concept of neutrality and abdicating any responsibility that an institution might have toward making their spaces and collections more responsive to their communities. Right now, we're doing a lot of meetings and groups and other actions that seem designed to give the air of legitimacy to whatever the administrators are going to do anyway by pretending it came from the focus groups. One library system over from us managed to get the right kind of buy-in from their administrators and city officials and was able to do much more productive and visible things because of it. I know there will always be limitations of law on what a library, as a tax-funded institution, can do, but I would like to work for an institution that sees those limitations as the out-of-bounds area and that everything else is worth entertaining ideas about if it would make things better for our customers. Instead, we seem to be afraid that anything that gets close to those spaces will immediately provoke an avalanche of lawsuits. In the current climate, that's probably a more warranted fear than it would be in other eras, but even so, it seems like the smart play is to stand up for and earn the trust of our communities so they will back us when some of those suits and complaints come for us, rather than attempt to pre-emptively appease people who will never be satisfied (they will never be satisfied).
I've been doing a lot of thinking about this in the last few years, which has been more about solidifying, finding support, and formalizing a lot of my more nebulous feelings on the matter. They've been there the whole time, but now I'm working on being more conscientious about them, and then proceeding from conscientious to more public about them. My organization hasn't censured me yet for the things I've been doing, so we're still going to keep operating on the idea that we will seek forgiveness when it's needed, rather than wait around for permission to arrive.
- conscientious (comparative more conscientious, superlative most conscientious)
- Thorough, careful, or vigilant in one’s task performance.
- Influenced by conscience; governed by a strict regard to the dictates of conscience, or by the known or supposed rules of right and wrong (said of a person).
There is conscientiousness that comes from having variable attention stimulus traits. It becomes part of the system to do things as soon after they have been asked or assigned, so as not to give the opportunity for the brain to file it away and then forget about it until reminded by a later stimulus. Or to commit the thing to an external memory device, whether paper or phone, so that it will provide a reminder and allow for successful completion of a task. It's not great when those systems still fail and something slips through the cracks, or when I think, in complete contradiction to everything that's happened before, that I might succeed at remembering this one thing this one time, even though I will probably have several other things asked of me that I will do in between when the thing is asked of me and when I have time to complete it. When you are governed by a brain that drops tasks that won't give it the stimulation it wants, no matter how necessary they are, you start having to become conscientious about how you interact with the world. And you quickly develop a way of asking forgiveness when things don't go according to plan (usually with self-recrimination and shame about having failed at something that should be easier than it actually is.)
There are other times where, because of that same variable attention stimulus trait, all of my conscientious goes out the window, and instead frustrating things get broken, or my patience evaporates completely, or I perceive someone's signs of anxiety as a personal slight that I am not moving fast enough, eveen though I am trying to fix the situation as quickly as I can. And if I could have the presence of mind to analyze those things and recognize them for what they are, things would go better. It's extra aggravation at times because it feels like I can control that part of me better at work than at home, but if I stop and think about it, work usually doesn't produce the same kind of situations where I would snap at someone because they are standing on all of my buttons at once and berating me for not having intuited what they want and delivered it to them before they had to talk to me. (My ex was terrible about a lot of things, but one of the things she was most consistently terrible about was not giving direction about how she wanted things done, to the point where I stopped trying to do anything that she hadn't given explicit instructions on how to do. I probably annoyed her by asking for those things all the time, but she brought it on herself by not explaining things until after I'd tried to do them in a way that made sense to me and appeared to produce the result she wanted. [There's two stories here that I would tell in the correct company to illustrate the communication problems we had here.]
When I'm feeling upset with myself over shortcomings and faults, dropped memory balls or undone tasks become "no person should trust me with anything at all, because I'll forget" and emotional dysregulation becomes "nobody should be a friend of mine or love me, because I lack the control to avoid turning into a big ball of anger at a moment's notice. Better for me to have no people around me that I could heart until I learn how to control myself properly." They're not spoken as cries for attention or for drama. They're sincere, conscientious beliefs with the well-being of others in mind. (After all, who wants another source of potential trauma and upset in their lives?) Yes, if that happened, I'd be miserable, because I'd be chasing perfection and losing all my friends at the first sign of a slip-up, which would make me even more miserable. But when those thoughts come around, I do believe them and think it would be better for everyone else to distance themselves from me until I can learn how to function like a normal person. (Right about now is where someone points out that "normal" people are really pretty screwy themselves.)
The second definition is one that pulls fairly strongly at me, although perhaps not as stongly if my situation were one of autism rather than variable attention. Despite the researchers choosing to pathologize the result, it turns out, at least in one study, autistics were much more conscientious and consistent in their moral stances. It is easy to have principled stances when those stances are coming from behind a keyboard, and much more difficult when they come into contact with other people. But I have also spent a fair amount of my career as someone who will step up to the plate for teenagers in the library, because they're important, and who can demonstrate that teenagers will come to the library for programming options if they get the opportunity. I may not be the best about maintaining professional distance and being an authority figure first, but it was better for the teens that someone was seeing them as something other than nuisances that needed to be kicked out and who could understand, if imperfectly, about the phase of life they were in and what kinds of decisions they might make in certain situations. With the presence of a teen librarian in my location, rather than just nebulously part of the system, that part of my career is coming to a close. What's replacing it seems to be ideas about improving the institution as a whole and trying to get my own specific institution to improve itself greatly in light of the amount of wisdom being dropped on us by researchers and by those brave enough to speak up where I can listen in about the experiences of people who don't look like me with libraries. Ideas on improvement have always been a part of me, but they're coming out more and more in publications and articles and presentations at this point than direct suggestions to our administration or using the only officially sanctioned channel to make suggestions with. (Mostly because my administration seems to believe that any genuine effort to have these conversations in any sort of public space where people can participate needs to be crushed immediately. Which is still consistent with the way that the ideas I had bounding into a system with my fresh-out-of-graduate-school perspective were shunted aside, told they were out of my scope, and otherwise shut down instead of supported. I'm just seeing it better now with time and perspective.) I have, for better or worse, embraced the ethos of pretending I am a mediocre white man and proceeding with the confidence of the same when it comes to submitting ideas and proposals for talks, and many of those proposals have borne fruit and I've been able to present them or have them published (for the admittedly limited audiences that my works reach.)
I think a fair amount of my library and librarian ethics are heterodox to the ones of my institution and of the national organization, and I am okay with that. I think many of those institutional ethics are supremely invested in the concept of neutrality and abdicating any responsibility that an institution might have toward making their spaces and collections more responsive to their communities. Right now, we're doing a lot of meetings and groups and other actions that seem designed to give the air of legitimacy to whatever the administrators are going to do anyway by pretending it came from the focus groups. One library system over from us managed to get the right kind of buy-in from their administrators and city officials and was able to do much more productive and visible things because of it. I know there will always be limitations of law on what a library, as a tax-funded institution, can do, but I would like to work for an institution that sees those limitations as the out-of-bounds area and that everything else is worth entertaining ideas about if it would make things better for our customers. Instead, we seem to be afraid that anything that gets close to those spaces will immediately provoke an avalanche of lawsuits. In the current climate, that's probably a more warranted fear than it would be in other eras, but even so, it seems like the smart play is to stand up for and earn the trust of our communities so they will back us when some of those suits and complaints come for us, rather than attempt to pre-emptively appease people who will never be satisfied (they will never be satisfied).
I've been doing a lot of thinking about this in the last few years, which has been more about solidifying, finding support, and formalizing a lot of my more nebulous feelings on the matter. They've been there the whole time, but now I'm working on being more conscientious about them, and then proceeding from conscientious to more public about them. My organization hasn't censured me yet for the things I've been doing, so we're still going to keep operating on the idea that we will seek forgiveness when it's needed, rather than wait around for permission to arrive.
