Hi there. This week’s piece is heavy and heartbreaking. Writing it was necessary in order to understand the burnout I feel in my day job. I wrote and kept it pretty much entirely stream-of-consciousness, so what you see is almost entirely unedited.
I hope you enjoy or at least gain some type of understanding. And to my lovely coworkers that are subscribed; I hope you recognize your strength. You make it all better.
Okay, now on to the essay. Thank you.
There’s a book facing outwards on an acrylic sign somewhere in the stacks between Qu and Z. It’s called “There’s No Such Thing as An Easy Job” and every time I see it I just say yeah. One day glass fell from the sky and onto our floor. The explanation; a patron hit a barrier with their wheelchair. I wasn’t there but the glass rain sounded picturesque and dangerous, fitting to the overall vibe of the library.
Some people don’t go to urgent care, they come here. We can’t legally give medical advice but we have trained EMTs on the safety staff and seeing them is by far much cheaper than the hospital. The other night one of our safety team members knelt down to bandage someone’s badly injured feet. It was biblical.
I was a kid and I loved books and I thought that shelving them might be fun. Then I blinked, and two years later I sit at the desk as people walk up and tell me the current tragedy of their life, desperation asking if there is anything I can do. They ask if there’s a legal place for them to stay on the street or if we have any food. The answer is usually no. There’s not much I can do but they tell me anyway, people need someone to talk to. So they talk and I print off a document that can lead them to resources. Or I point them downstairs to see if our social worker is in. I constantly feel like I’m sending people in need on wild goose chases.
Everyone tells me that my job seems amazing fun and easy. And I believed that for a really long time.
When I see people at shows or other artistic events, I’m introduced as a librarian, not a writer. I feel like I’m the only one like that. I don’t introduce my friends as baristas, I introduce them as musicians. I’m not mad at anyone for this. It’s impossible to work at the Main Library and not have it consume me. But then people I’ve just met ask me what it’s like, so I smile and say it’s good. Internally I scream.
Up until recently, I felt like I was being dramatic about any difficulties. It took sitting down with loved ones and telling them the truth of the job for me to realize how bad it is. Almost everyone who knows all of it, the good, bad and ugly, is appalled. They immediately tell me that I need to leave. That I shouldn’t be doing this anymore.
The other day I walked into the building as it was raining. The roof won’t be fixed for another year, or two. The water seeps through the glass parts of the roof and drips down onto the stairs, where we place a trash can to catch it. The building becomes humid and all the smells are amplified. Urine, tobacco, and body odor are the main notes. On days like this, I have a horrible headache my whole shift. The smell permeates everywhere and has the power to distract me from any good part of the day. It’s the inconvenience of it but also the reason it’s there. People are left behind by every single system, every safety net that was supposed to save them. Then they end up here. And sometimes they can’t take care of themselves, so that’s why they smell bad. Thinking of that makes me feel like shit for ever judging them, so I typically just try to leave that thought and go on with my day.
Every day I work I think that I might watch someone die that day. I find patrons blacked out or slumped over from pure exhaustion. I call our safety team and sometimes they call an ambulance. I watch someone get carried out on a stretcher. This happens regularly, and I wonder every day if they survived.
It’s not all bad. Sometimes I get to make library cards for a beautiful young family. Sometimes, there’s someone fresh out of prison, excited to get a library card and read whatever they want. Sometimes one of the teen regulars brings in a yo-yo and teaches me how to do tricks. Sometimes I get to introduce a girl my age to what will be her new favorite book. Sometimes, it’s slow and I get to sit at the desk with my beloved coworkers and crochet. It is moments like these that make me love it all. It is moments like these that I tell everyone about.
When people ask me “how is the library?” I’ll tell them those things. Only the good. There’s no easy way to tell a casual friend that I get sexually harassed by an old man on almost every shift. I spend the majority of my time trying to help the people that everyone else gets to turn away from their businesses. I am too burnt out by all of this to acknowledge the books or true library work most days. Either me or one of my coworkers cry almost every shift. We make abysmal money for what we do, while up in the ivory tower of admin there are people making six figures.
It’s social stratification live. It’s also the ground for a culture war that risks our funding and safety. Libraries receive bomb threats regularly and it likely has to do with the increase in book bans. We received threats for weeks straight last year and librarians were ludicrously expected to do bomb sweeps. We didn’t even close.
My department is the busiest floor in the busiest library in the system. We have the most accessible bathrooms from the entrance and the most computers. The floor is packed as a default, and on top of that we also have the bustling teen area.
Without fail, my coworkers are the brightest, most passionate, and kindest people. They enrich my life so much and I form amazing connections with them. But I have watched so many of them leave. Sometimes it’s because a better opportunity comes up in the system, but usually the stress of working in this department is a large contributing factor. Every time this happens, I mourn and I wonder if I’m next.
I work part time. Not many in my life are aware of that. A lot of my friends and family thought I was full time. In a way I am. I have a bad habit of not letting go of it on my days off. I compulsively check my work email and google chat. What I’ve seen plays on the back of my eyelids as I fall asleep. I work 19 hours a week there, it feels like 60.
I took that feeling, that lingering effect as a sign that I should just go full time. I needed the money and I feel a passion for what I do. The maw of the library opened up and I figured I should just jump in fully. I applied for a few positions and it’s a long story but the short of it is that they passed me over. It was devastating. I had planned to get the job, charting out the next few years with all that as a given. It felt like the rug being pulled out from under me when I got the final rejection.
In the wake of it, I worked harder. I took up new projects and tried to smile at every patron, even if they were cussing me out. I helped as much as I could with our department’s transition to a new manager and a lot of new hires. I tried to convince myself that I could keep this all a part of my life.
I ask myself now why I didn’t just leave then. Up until the full time issue, I had convinced myself that I was an all too valuable asset to the library. That I was called to do this, that I couldn’t leave because it was too important of work. It’s savior complex-y and self aggrandizing, I recognize this. But it’s also just not the truth as to why I felt a pull to stay there.
I recently read an article that took a retrospective on trauma science in the wake of the publishing of The Body Keeps the Score, the groundbreaking text about trauma science and PTSD. The article was really good in a metanalysis way and put a lot of words to feelings I’ve been having about the general conversation around trauma. But most importantly and reminded me a lot about concepts I’ve already learned, partially from reading the book. I read this article at work, during a lull. When I read this part, a chill ran through me.
“Van der Kolk set out to determine what kind of physiological system could account for this type of “body memory.” In an extraordinary paper from 1985, he proposed the first neurobiological model for PTSD, one that could explain why trauma victims so often return to situations in which the traumatic experience will likely repeat. Freud had called this the “repetition compulsion.” When animals are continually subjected to inescapable shocks, it triggers a stress response that includes the release of endogenous opioids as an analgesic. When the stressor ends, van der Kolk hypothesized, it could cause an opioid-withdrawal effect, which the stressed subject might try to fix by seeking reexposure to the stressor. Perhaps, he posited, chronic exposure to stress created trauma junkies addicted to the high of endogenous opioids. Maybe this was why, for instance, abused children often grow up to choose violent partners.”
Trauma junkie. I think that’s why I want to stay, I’m just addicted. Sometimes I pick up shifts at the branches in my library system. It’s quiet and the majority of the job is just checking out books or working on projects. I feel itchy when I’m there. I hate the calmness. That itch, that hatred for serenity, its withdrawal. It’s the disease.
The building I work in is beautiful but ineffective. It leaks. It seems to be designed to amplify sound. The water main break every few months like clockwork. Right before I started working here, a leak from the roof destroyed a large part of the nonfiction collection. It seems like it wasn’t built to be a library. It’s not even effective in fulfilling the hidden goal of libraries, to serve as a day shelter.
The Main Library opened on February 8th 2003. A month and a day earlier, I was born. I used to think of this as a sign that I was meant to work there. Me and Main, we’re the same age. I feel a deep connection to her. It’s a traumatic bond, an abusive and exploitative relationship. I listen to angsty songs and I think about that building.
Lately, it feels like Main wasn’t built to be a library and lately, it feels like I wasn’t built to be a library worker. Or at least, not one in the capacity it requires me to be.
I feel guilty. I feel like I’m putting my head into the sand. I feel like I’m abandoning the people that need help most. I feel weaker than all the people who have done this longer than me.
But overall, I feel like I need to go. I feel like it’s not worth it to sacrifice my own health, safety, and self esteem in order for a slim chance at helping someone in a horrible situation. I’m not saving anyone if I’m getting ruined by it. Especially at $16 an hour.
I know I’m not weak. I’m 20 and was not told this would be the nature of the job. I was in large part exploited for my passion by the powers that be. This is how labor works.
This week I started at my second job at a children’s museum. It’s whimsical and playful and everyone seems happy to be there. It might not be perfect, but it won’t make me cry every week and the pay is decent. The only issue with it right now is that it doesn’t scratch that traumatic itch that working at Main does, but that’s not really an issue. Going from my shift there to my shift at the library felt like flipping a switch and all of the color draining out of the world. I took that as a sign that I need to reconsider my library plans.
I don’t know what my future with the library looks like anymore, but I don’t want to stay a trauma junkie. I can work at a branch or become a substitute and not have to step foot in that building for a long long time. There’s a way for me to stay a library worker without this much pain.
Even if there’s not, I can leave altogether. It’s up to me.
The mission of the library I work at is to “make lives better.” I got so caught up in that idea, but what about my life? What about my coworkers’ lives? What about us?