It’s LIS Mental Health Week; a week focused on raising awareness of mental health. This post isn’t about mental health per se, but something that I think, for me, is very much exacerbated by anxiety and the constant negative self-appraisal that comes with it.
Two blog posts really resonated with me recently. Sarah Houghton (who I believe is exactly the same age as I am or pretty darn close) wrote about being mid-career and at a personal and professional crossroads without any clear sense of direction but knowing that forward is the only way to go. Veronica Arellano Douglas wrote about her feelings that she’s never quite doing enough professionally and how academia encourages this feeling through reifying busy-ness and overwork. I’ve been in a weird place for close to a year now and I’m not really sure yet how to push my way though it. It’s not terrible or anything. I’m not depressed. I really like my job. I love my colleagues and the students and faculty I get to work with. But I feel rudderless. I feel unsure about what my purpose is in this profession anymore and what I really should be focusing on. It’s not as if I’m not still working hard and committed to my job, but I don’t have the passionate sense of mission I used to with everything I did.
How do you develop a sense of purpose and direction that guides everything you do? I pretty much just fell into the things I was passionate about for the first decade of my career. My early-career experience was so bizarre because of this blog and the reputation I developed. I started my blog and people started to believe that I knew things even though I was just figuring everything out as I went along. I created a wiki and suddenly I was an authority on wikis. I pursued things like Five Weeks to a Social Library because I was passionate about affordable online learning for library professionals. I fell into every success I had. I did all of my learning and made all of my mistakes in public, some of which are painful to look back on now. So many people asked me for advice as if I had some kind of expertise when I was still just learning how to be a professional. I’m not complaining. It was exciting, weird, wonderful, gratifying, and also really hard for someone who deals with anxiety. I never felt like I deserved any of the awards or opportunities I received back then and I had a lot of guilt, though I worked so hard and spent nearly all of my time (pre-baby) focused on our profession. It never felt like enough. I look back and I wish I had enjoyed it all more because, in hindsight, I see how hard I worked for it.
Now that I’m 40 (gasp!), I’ve been devouring fiction and non-fiction (memoir, not self-help) about women at mid-life and how they reconcile the person they are, the person they were, and the person they want to be. So many books about women and personal growth at midlife are like Eat, Pray, Love where a woman chucks her old life and goes on a journey and is all the better for it. But I like to think about what that journey, that reckoning could look like if she stays in her life, as most of us do. Can you only have epiphanies while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, doing yoga in India, or kayaking remote waters alone? That isn’t a realistic option for most of us. I love reading about women’s messy midlife crises like Chris Kraus’ in I Love Dick, but it frustrates me that most of them are about men and sex. In my personal life, I know that I am exactly where I want to be. Professionally though? I almost feel like I need to do whatever the professional version of buying a sports car is, because I feel so rudderless. I want to metaphorically set fire to everything because I have no idea where to go from here.
I thought, for a long time, that the brass ring to reach for was becoming a Director. I thought so highly of my first library director and I moved in that “evidence of increasingly responsible experience” direction. As a middle manager, I loved supporting my direct reports and leading projects, but I hated that between a rock and a hard place experience many middle managers have, especially in toxic workplaces. After spending one year barely working the reference desk, I realized that I never really wanted to give up the “meat-and-potatoes” work of librarianship. I love teaching and working directly with students and faculty. There are aspects of being a director that interest me, but the schmoozing, budgeting, and spending my life in meetings aspects more than outweigh any positives for me.
Tenure and, in my current job, continuous appointment were things to work toward and “proving myself a valuable member of the team” was a solid sense of direction for the first three years of my current job. This Spring, I received notice that I’d be getting continuous appointment at work. After the drama of working towards tenure at my last job, it felt great to know I was finally “safe.” It was the first time I’ve felt I could relax in so many years. But I also experienced something of a letdown because I had been driving towards something for so long and working so hard and now what? I’ve felt this year a bit empty at work. I’m still really productive and passionate about my day-to-day teaching, but I feel rudderless. I’m not unhappy, really, just… I don’t know.
After having my son, I had to wrestle with my new identity as a mother and what that meant for me professionally, all the while dealing with epic postpartum depression. Even once the depression lifted, as the child of a stay-at-home mom, I spent a long time feeling like I wasn’t devoting enough time to parenting and feeling tremendous guilt. I remember trying to volunteer at my son’s school when he was in Kindergarten and make it work with my full-time job and feeling like I was burning the candle at both ends. It became abundantly clear to me that my son didn’t give a shit whether I was there to help his class make Jackson Pollock-esque paintings or plant seeds in the school garden or not and that no one was judging me for not being there (at least no one I cared about) other than myself. I still feel guilty every time a school volunteer opportunity comes across my email even though I know I shouldn’t feel that way. I’ve gotten really good at leaving my work at work and engaging with my family at home. But the funniest thing is that the better work-life balance I achieve, the less positively I’ve felt about myself. It’s like, even though I’m doing what I should be doing, I feel like I’m failing to do enough in both realms of my life.
I spent the first decade of my career so focused and passionate and now I just don’t have a clue what’s next. What do I want to deeply engage with? What am I most passionate about? Where should I focus my efforts at work to have the most impact? What can I do to make our profession better? What can I do to be a better person/wife/mother/citizen/librarian? I know my history of depression and anxiety with its obsessive focus on self isn’t helping me here and I honestly feel embarrassed to feel this way; first world problems, right? But I’ve read enough about the “female midlife crisis” to know that I’m not alone in feeling this way.
For those of you in similar straits, how are you coping with this “what’s next?” feeling? For people who’ve already navigated these waters, what did you do to get past it? How do you reignite that passionate spark for your work? Veronica wrote about how the idealization of overwork in academia leads to guilt and “leaves folks ripe for exploitation.” I wonder if it also leads “reformed” overworkers to this sense of rudderlessness when they try to let go of it. What do you think?
Hi Meredith,
I have followed your blog for years, and this post (as many others in this excellent blog) struck a chord with me. I have been thinking about some of these issues myself lately. I´ll turn 40 this year, too. Weird to think about.
Even though most people in Norway (where I live) have a good work-life balance (even academics for the most part), I think many experience the pressure to perform well at work and the guilt of not always being able to participate on every bake sale/football game/violin lessons their child is engaged in. (Is that a women´s thing, btw? The guilt, I mean.)
While I don´t really see myself as mid-career yet, I do so understand the feeling of being a little lost sometimes. We don´t have the same kind of tenure system as you do in the States, but librarians in academic libraries are taking more and more courses and degrees to get higher formal competence. I would say that more librarians are actively involved in research than they were just a decade or two ago. For me, my energy comes (and goes) with motivation. I am always on the look-out (sp?) for new projects or interesting people to collaborate with, and in doing so, I usually find the motivation to keep learning new things and try to contribute with the knowledge I already have.
My former manager had a saying: “It´s important find the time to play a little” – meaning that even though we are busy with running the library and teaching, curating, and supporting learning for students and staff, we have to find the time to play around with ideas or technology (or whatever) even though it may lead to nothing. Finding joy in what we do, learning new things, finding interesting people to learn from and work with – these are things that motivate me to stay in my job and still have a place to go, even mid-career. Good luck!
Thanks!! I think you hit the nail on the head about making time for “play.” That used to be a much bigger part of my work-life I wonder if the loss of that is partially behind the way I feel.
I wondered in the wilderness for the first ten years of my career. Getting my feet wet, changing jobs and moving for love and working in a pretty low level position. Then I got a dream job as a front line youth librarian and manager. For the next twenty years I poured my heart and soul into a dynamic, interesting, innovative and amazing community and library.
I did hit the skids halfway through that job in my late thirties. I shifted my energy and focus to aim towards eventually getting a job as a library consultant as a next job step. That led me to develop both as a free-lance storyteller, a writer and as a presenter at workshops and conferences. While the hoped for consultant job never opened up in the go-go world of 1980’s-90’s full-employment, my skill set exploded and I happily rode that wave. It made my daily job richer, deeper and connected me to the community and partners as we learned to do better librarianship together.
At the same time I got very active in state and national library association, learning from peers and mentors from all types of libraries and unknowingly building up a huge network of contacts. So when I would hit a stretch in my job/life that was less challenging or focused, I had my freelancing and association work to try innovative approaches. And I focused on opening as many doors for library peers as I could – connecting them with association work, presentation opportunities, mentoring and giving them any tools I could to find their way to their dreams.
The last ten years of my full-time career, I moved to be near/help frail parents in their last journeys. The daily job was challenging but kept me learning. I was heading towards retirement when I received a library-peer reward. And that changed my professional life considerably. People asked me to present more, I began serving on boards and my consulting career took off astronomically. It allowed me to retire early and work happily as a consultant where I am now just prior to real retirement which is around the corner.
The point of this shameless memoir-screed? For me, stepping aside and around, seeing what hatched and focusing differently each time I hit a wall saved my sanity. Looking back I can see periods of “winter” where I was hibernating (less active, less focused, less passionate) but they inevitably were followed by “spring” – renewal, refocus and recommitment.
I think that spring will come for you!
Thanks so much for sharing your experiences, Marge! Totally not shameless and very helpful for those of us who are inhabiting the same space I am right now.
Meredith — oh, so much this. I have a workplace I love where they trusted me enough to put me in a new to build new things for our students and faculty. I love where I live. Everything is wonderful, but…
But. Part of it is just exhaustion from a disabling disease that has been a real challenge lately. Part of it is that I thought I wanted to be a director, but a hefty taste of the nastier side of performance management left me with a bad taste, and now I feel slightly badly about not wanting that particular brass ring. (Is it enough to just be a librarian in a job I love?)
I’m trying to figure out where my fizz went. I used to be and feel fizzy.
Colleen, I’m always in awe of how much you accomplish in spite of the illnesses you deal with on a nearly daily basis. I wonder if getting that under control will bring the fizz back, because golly, you sure do challenge yourself with the new position and all of the scholarship you’re engaged with. Actually, it’s kind of nice to hear from someone who is very engaged like I used to be and still feels this; maybe throwing myself back into that world won’t be the answer. Here’s to both of us getting the fizz back!!
I think the second commenter’s last paragraph is in line with my suggestion. I would suggest that you need a year or so to just do normal stuff, let yourself lie fallow, and take in ideas without putting them out. Maybe journal (here?) a bit more, while just ruminating. I suspect that once you do that for a while, you will find something that will fire you up. But I suspect you may just be professionally tired, and need a bit of time to rest.
I am somewhat in a similar position right now, as I started a new position a little over a year ago. It was definitely a desired change, but it’s taking me some time to find my place.
Thanks for starting this conversation! I’ve been feeling similarly and thanks to these commenters I think I shall characterize it as a period of ‘winter’ of indeterminate length, with surely something else to follow. And if I can’t see where any of it is heading, perhaps I need to keep my options open and find other ways to enjoy the journey (i.e. play). It does feel odd, though, having been so driven for so many years, to feel directionless.
“After having my son, I had to wrestle with my new identity as a mother and what that meant for me professionally, all the while dealing with epic postpartum depression. Even once the depression lifted, as the child of a stay-at-home mom, I spent a long time feeling like I wasn’t devoting enough time to parenting and feeling tremendous guilt. I remember trying to volunteer at my son’s school when he was in Kindergarten and make it work with my full-time job and feeling like I was burning the candle at both ends. It became abundantly clear to me that my son didn’t give a shit whether I was there to help his class make Jackson Pollock-esque paintings or plant seeds in the school garden or not and that no one was judging me for not being there (at least no one I cared about) other than myself.”
YES. YES. YES. I accepted a tenure-track librarian position when my daughter was five months old. I’m turning 36 this year, she’ll be four, and I’m just now coming to terms that it was “ok” that I wanted to work. My mother stayed at home when I was young, my sister currently stays at home, and even though I didn’t want to stay home myself, I felt extremely guilty going to work.
Now that my daughter is four, she’s happy, independent, and also doesn’t “give a shit” if I can’t make it to all the pre-K school parties. She tells her friends that her mommy works at the really big library.
I loved this post. Thanks for sharing.