My first and second takes on this update were long-winded and purple, so it’s just as well that my laptop died a few minutes before I was ready to click “Save & Publish”––a small blessing, but still a blessing.
Here’s the summary version: I quit my job, and I feel mostly fine with that decision.
I say that, and then it feels arrogant. There are so many in this country (not to mention this world) that have found themselves jobless due to COVID-19, and I choose to let go of a job with benefits? I’m not the first person in my family to do so, but I am the first to do so without the stabilizing presence of a spouse. That’s not to say it would have been easy for my siblings and parents to electively leave jobs as they have done; I would still be paralyzed if I were doing this while also a parent.
I’m not trying to be arrogant. I’m trying to do what’s best for the library and for me at the same time, and that’s not always easy. But thanks to COVID-19 and a transition in leadership, the job I was hired to do here is mostly gone. Collection development? Live programming? A lively and interactive Summer Reading Program? Gone. All it took was a two-week snarl in England and I came home to a job that had moved on without me. And sure, I caught up as well as I could, introducing digital programs to perform some of the same functions, but … couple that with a steady erosion of both the trust of my library’s Director and therefore my responsibilities, I found I could only be two kinds of person: the kind that rose to a very low bar and underperformed, or the kind that held true to my vision for my position and existed in constant tension with the one person whose good opinion determines the forward momentum of my career. I don’t know what I’ll think of my decision in five or ten years, but I do know that what left me in a vulnerable position, so easily shoved off-kilter by global and personal catastrophe, was years of self-doubt brought on by changing expectations in the workplace.
COVID-19 was just a hard shove out a door I had been slowly backing toward for a while, maybe. Perhaps ever since I wrapped up my Library Science degree in December 2018. But rest assured, leaving the library on the 16th will continue to haunt me for a while. It will be the first time in my adult life that I won’t be working off of a four- or five-year plan. Does that scare me? Absolutely. Does it scare me as much as it did before I realized that the protections and stability offered by a job with benefits are illusory anyway, thanks to COVID-19? Not so much. And perhaps someone else needs those illusions a bit more than me right now, someone who won’t go into the job I’m leaving with expectations based on a world––and specifically a Director––before everything changed.
I will be the library’s biggest booster. I will champion that future Youth Services Librarian among all of the parents and educators with whom I have developed friendships. I am quite excited, really, to see what that person does with the job, and what opportunities they can see that I did not. And if I ever have the good luck to get to know that future librarian, I will give them all the words of affirmation that I wish I had gotten. Because the job is hard, even so changed as it has become. It is hard and it is demanding and it is wonderful.
What’s next?
Find a job, yes, absolutely. But also … recover. Figure out who I am, really. I’m not a writer, obviously, so my years in the MFA program in Tucson are somewhat misleading. Am I still a librarian? Yes. Yes, absolutely! But is a writer a writer if they don’t write? Is a librarian a librarian if they don’t work in a library? It’s a strange space to find myself in, with a garden and a lot of confused thoughts over joblessness and accepting help from others and figuring out what it feels like to know something is true and not be told it isn’t. I mean, I’ve heard plenty about gaslighting in respect to domestic relationships, but what about professional ones? I feel like I’m a child and relearning the basics of how to walk, talk, and pretend not to cry. It’s time for me to grow up a little, and reach for my next dream. (But first, weed the garden.)
I’m going to miss “my” kids. The hundreds of children in Tucson with whom I have fallen in love, collectively, will themselves fall in love with my successor. That is good and right. And I will feel a little sad over that always, as also is right. And now that I’ve taken a step out of my illusory safety net, it’s time for me to do the next right thing.
Oh no. Not … the Disney song … problem ….
(You can measure how long a person has worked with children by how many completely ordinary phrases become launchpads to spontaneous workplace sing-alongs.)