I spend a lot of words and space on this blog giving you advice on what to do with yourself professionally. Today I want to talk about something outside of your professional lives. I have something important to tell you:
More importantly, though, this is something I'm doing just for me. It feels odd that this half hour lesson every other week and 15-30 minutes of practice every day isn't in service of my health or my religious practice or making something for a friend or my profession. But it feels good.
You are not your job/profession.That might seem obvious at first. "Of course I'm not my job," I can almost hear you saying. But there have been days in my professional life when things were going Titanic-Sunk-By-An-Iceberg bad for me and I felt like a complete failure not only as a librarian but as a person. I think that happens when I let myself get too wrapped up in labels, which I still do even though I haven't had a day that bad in a while. I'm giving you advice here that I need to hear as well. I need to hear it regularly. Take, for example, my Twitter bio:
"I've a distrust of labels, but these generally apply: librarian, feminist, Buddhist, rad fatty, nerd, academic, & usually she/her/hers."It's hard for me to separate myself, and my sense of identity, from my twelve years in the field and a couple of years before that preparing to enter it. It's also hard to separate my sense of self from all those other descriptors (metadata?). But it's important for me to try, because - as I already said - I am not my job. And trust me, I know this is going to sound weird coming from the writer of a blog that is 90% about librarianship and higher education and related fields. But the other 10% is important. Let me tell you why...
Just had my first lesson. Love that frustration of learning something new. pic.twitter.com/Wt3VdnyuLu� Jessica Olin (@olinj) August 4, 2015I've started taking guitar lessons recently. I've only had one lesson so far, but I love it. I love learning new things, things that stretch me just a little but not too much. And learning to play the guitar is definitely that. I had lots of different kinds of music lessons when I was growing up, both at school and outside. I studied violin, clarinet, piano, and lots and lots of voice lessons. I have vague memories of being taught to sight read music, especially in piano and voice, so learning to play guitar is syncing up with that dormant part of my brain that I used to use so much when I was younger. Learning guitar is so much fun.More importantly, though, this is something I'm doing just for me. It feels odd that this half hour lesson every other week and 15-30 minutes of practice every day isn't in service of my health or my religious practice or making something for a friend or my profession. But it feels good.
Now onto the reason why I wanted to tell you about my lessons. I'm no expert on impostor syndrome, but I wonder if some of that phenomenon is tied to how we form our sense of identity. For example the reason I resisted calling myself a Buddhist for so long is that I felt like I was faking it and I didn't want to be a bad Buddhist. I had daydreamed up this nightmare scenario about someone who was raised Buddhist suddenly quizzing me on the life of Siddhartha Gautama or the Four Noble Truths. I eventually let go of that fear, more because I studied a lot and have a solid base of knowledge. I think I would have been better served by letting go of my attachment to that label, and I wonder if the same thing could work for librarianship. Maybe, just maybe, if we stop basing our identities on "librarian" and start letting each other just be, maybe we can get over that feeling that we're faking it. Having something in our lives that is just for us can help, I know.
What do you think? I know this is a nascent thing, but seriously, I want feedback on this pet theory. And thanks.
Emoticon