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Tuesday 2 February 2016

Who are you and what have you done with my Impostor Syndrome?

Raise your hand if any of the following things are true of you:
  • I have regularly worked longer hours than I am contractually required to and/or skipped at least one entire break in a working day.
  • I have intentionally gone to work ill or felt incredibly guilty about calling in sick.
  • I frequently feel worried that my work isn't good enough and that at some point I will be "found out".
  • The more I am praised or recognised for my work, the more pressure I put on myself to live up to my own impossible expectations.
I'm going to have to put my hand down now because it's hard to type. (Which is to say, me too.) I would be embarrassed admitting something so personal but I think it's true of so many people I know in life in general and in libraries specifically. It's something I've been consciously working on for the last year or so but like all progress, it's seldom straightforward.


I won't go into the specifics of why I'm writing about this now, suffice it to say that my co-workers are fantastic and helped me realise pretty quickly that I was working WAY too hard for a couple of weeks and not taking care of myself. Part of it was time pressure and part of it was genuinely enjoying what I was doing enough to not want to switch off at 5:00, but underneath that there was lurking the ever-present sense that I needed to earn my value through productivity.

Important things to remember, by the incomparably lovely Stevie Wilson.
That is not and has never been true. In the comic above I feel like the artist is dealing with a sense of dissatisfaction with her "day job" as a barista, but the same feeling can be present if you love your job. Indeed, I think it's even harder to separate your sense of value from what you do all day when you're passionate about what you do. Being a research support librarian is my dream job and I love it, but that doesn't mean there isn't more to me. And that other stuff is worth cultivating and caring for. You, yourself, alone, doing nothing, accomplishing nothing, have value.

This week a very lovely and helpful person sent me this article, which I of course related to massively and which reminded me about all the work I've been trying to do on keeping everything in balance:

This is just a library. It’s not heart surgery. This work will all be here when we get to it.
So, take a minute and assess your workload and your projects. Are any of them emergencies? Ask your boss for a meeting and ask for help prioritizing the work if you need to. Whatever you do, Shiny New Librarians, do not try and be the hero and overdo it because we need you. We need you to do all of the cool great things you’re doing now, but we also need you to make it into management without being burned out and angry. We need you to run the next generation of libraries and protect the new people from themselves.
- bossladywrites

It's reminded me to be more mindful, to be able to put things aside and know that it will be okay. Nothing's going to catch fire if I don't finish that report RIGHT NOW. It's reminded me that I am sometimes so worried and stressed about living up to expectations that I make it harder for myself to do good and meaningful work. So, I've streamlined things a bit, worked on my task management, tried to reign in a bit of my multi-tasking so that I'm really focused on what I'm doing at any given moment and tried to be more disciplined about actually going home at a reasonable hour. My graph is still more of a squiggly line than a nice straight line, but as long as the squiggles are trending in the right direction I think I'll call it a win! 

I hope that if you put your hand up at the beginning of this post you'll think about what's behind that and remember that you, too, have value as yourself.