I’m also really honored to be keynoting the Conference on Academic Library Management (CALM) next month, talking about slow management in a fast world. Ironically, I had thought of submitting a proposal to give a talk on slow librarianship at the conference but talked myself out of it because I’m not currently a manager. It’s amazing that after 20 years in this profession, I still suffer from impostor syndrome. CALM has consistently been my favorite library conference to attend and it’s a conference that has embraced slow practices in everything they do so I’m especially honored to have been asked to speak. The conference is free to attend and my talk will be recorded, so I’ll be sure to share it once it’s up on the web.

As a scholar of time, I’m always interested in different forms of time (queer time, crip time, etc.). Strike time feels really strange. We were talking this morning on the picket line how it feels a lot like early COVID where time moved very differently. We feel like the days are both way too long and super short with not enough time to get everything done but also too much time just staring at different union social channels. We’re totally energized and totally exhausted (I’m lying on the couch like a ragdoll right now after three hours of holding signs, screaming, and dancing, marching and chanting with hundreds of colleagues). In terms of information, we feel like we’re both drinking from a firehose and like we don’t have any of the information we need. We have no idea what the near-term future will bring. What day of the week it is feels almost arbitrary because none of the usual markers of those days apply (I see all the things I was supposed to have been doing at work each day on my calendar and it feels like another life entirely). We’re both unmoored and deeply connected. I love it (the connection and collective power) and I also really hate it (for our students, for our colleagues who live paycheck to paycheck, for what the administration and the Board are doing to my beloved institution). 

So it’s weird to feel both temporarily severed from the College and also more deeply connected than ever. These administrators may run the College and have the authority to make decisions, but they are not the College. The College is the people I’ve seen on the picket lines the past few days in the rain and freezing cold. These people who are truly fighting for the soul of our college. They make the College run, from teaching classes, to assisting students with all kinds of needs, to helping students feel welcome, to keeping the College clean and safe and keeping students fed. All of these things are critical and the College can’t run without us, but I’m not entirely sure the same can be said of our administrators. The College is also our students, many of whom have stood with us on the line, who’ve brought us food, or have supported us through emails to the President and Board and on social media. I feel incredibly grateful for our students who clearly see through the bs administration is putting out there. 

It’s been kind of incredible to see how unprepared our administration was for this after 11 months in which they barely moved in negotiations. They’ve known for months that a strike  was a distinct possibility and they were the ones who walked away from the bargaining table the night before the strike was meant to happen. The latest email from the President said “I will say, with some pride, that we are not – and we should not – be an organization that is good at navigating this scenario” but, honestly, they should have had guidance for students ready to go. Administrators are supposed to plan for scenarios like this. They had units planning for two different scenarios for cuts from the State (neither of which came to pass). We spent almost a year planning what we would cut if LSTA funds went away in our state for the next year (they didn’t, thank goodness). Most faculty, on the other hand, have been talking to students about a possible strike for the past six weeks at least and the union provided tons of resources to help them come up with a plan for their own classes. Yet the College was left totally scrambling last Wednesday as if they had no idea this could happen. Baffling.

It’s been interesting seeing some managers show up to bring food and/or spend a bit of time with us on the line. It’s not a lot of them, but it means a lot to us when someone does. They’ve told us about the absolute unprepared hot mess that is administration right now and it’s nice to realize that not every middle manager tows the party line at all times. But the vast majority of our managers sent us emails just before the start of the strike asking us to let them know if we were working or not, so most are definitely sticking with administration.

I had a boss many years ago who definitely put her employees first and advocated fiercely for us. She said she saw her role as being akin to a manager of a minor league baseball team. She was here to help develop us for bigger and better things in our careers. She was a major mentor to me in my early years in the profession. Since then, the bosses I’ve had really prioritized the people above them in the org chart ahead of the people below them. They have been classic “company [wo]men.” Helping us develop in our careers or even supporting us when we explicitly asked for it wasn’t part of the job. When I was a middle manager, I took the exact opposite approach and that’s why I’m no longer a middle manager. I always saw the role of a manager as supporting one’s direct reports (essentially, I worked for them) and that wasn’t what the people in charge of the library wanted me to do.

The great library leader Mitch Freedman died recently and it made me think about whether leaders like him can really exist in our much more corporatized libraries these days. If you don’t know about Mitch’s storied biography as a library leader and awesome human, please take a moment to read about him here in an obit from his family. When I was coming up as a librarian, he was the sort of man who was a model for me in successfully operating in our field with total moral courage. He lived his values every day. He fought for people and the things that he believed in. He centered the folks who were oppressed. He believed relationships were core to our work. In many ways, he embodied the “Good” and the “Human(e)” characteristics of slow librarianship (maybe also the “Thoughtful” but I didn’t work with him, so I’m not sure). His amazing daughter, Jenna Freedman, also lives her values courageously, a living tribute to his example.

I hope there are still library managers out there still who have moral courage and fight the good fight, but, more and more, it feels like the people who become library Deans, Directors, and University Librarians are the ones who are willing to comply and conform, not the ones willing to rock the boat. As our institutions become more and more corporatized and neoliberal, we see less and less moral courage. I see a lot of library administrators wanting to look like they’re doing good more than they actually want to do good. I think of the leaders who all started EDI initiatives or published EDI statements right around 2020 and then let them fade away. Most of the people I see doing amazing values-driven work in our field these days are not leading libraries. They’re mostly front-line librarians. I wonder if it’s because like me, folks are not willing to make the moral compromises so many have to make these days to climb the ladder.

In “Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class,” the great (and deeply missed) David Graeber wrote about how 

the decisive victory of capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, ironically, has… led to both a continual inflation of what are often purely make-work managerial and administrative positions—”bullshit jobs”—and an endless bureaucratization of daily life, driven, in large part, by the Internet. This in turn has allowed a change in dominant conceptions of the very meaning of words like “democracy.” The obsession with form over content, with rules and procedures, has led to a conception of democracy itself as a system of rules, a constitutional system, rather than a historical movement toward popular self-rule and self-organization, driven by social movements, or even, increasingly, an expression of popular will.

I see that in my own place of work. So much of my boss’ (our Dean’s) job is box checking compliance type work – approving vacations and sick leave, making sure we’re doing required trainings and other things the people above her on the org chart want us to do, making sure we’re doing all of the things contractually required of us, etc. It used to be that I met with her once each term to talk about what I was working on, go over my progress on my goals, etc. Then I went to meeting with her just once in Fall where we’d look at my goals document (without any meaningful feedback or support) and then I’d fill out a Google form at the end of the year to tell her what I did (with again no meaningful feedback). Now, even that Fall meeting is gone as her load of compliance-related work has increased. There’s no support outside of helping us navigate the bureaucracy of our institution. There’s no “walking around” as Mitch Freedman did – building relationships with employees and making them feel seen. There’s no focus on our development or talking about the meaning behind what we do. There’s just this compliance-focused flurry of activity. 

As our colleges and universities become more and more corporatized, they turn what were supposed to be leadership positions, that required vision and people skills, and turn them into babysitting jobs because, lord knows, we professionals can’t be trusted. Our college, like many, has seen a massive growth in the number of managerial positions, and yet, faculty and staff are being asked to do more administrative work than ever before, not less. Why? Well, of course those managers have to justify their existence. 

Could a Mitch Freedman become a library director today? Would he have had to compromise his values somewhere down the line to get there? Do you know of any library leaders like Mitch today who are able to operate successfully in these more neoliberal environments? 

In that same piece, David Graeber writes “scholars are expected to spend less and less of their time on scholarship, and more and more on various forms of administration—even as their administrative autonomy is itself stripped away. Here too we find a kind of nightmare fusion of the worst elements of state bureaucracy and market logic.” This is the reality we find ourselves in as our two unions fight for better pay, but even more importantly, for a real, substantial model of shared governance which we don’t currently have (and which our college President agreed to and then hired a consultant to create for us ). The fact that the only college committee or governance group that has the ability to conduct a vote of no confidence in our President (which they successfully passed!) is our student government is a stark reminder of how little power and voice we have in the future of our college. It can be so easy to just focus on keeping our head down and doing the good work we do as educators, as supporters of students and faculty, as stewards of collections, etc., but when we fight together like this, we fight for the heart and soul of our organization. We fight for an organization that centers students and their needs and listens deeply to those who directly serve and educate them. 

Walking the picket line the first couple of days was brutal in many ways. I was so cold and wet I couldn’t even grip my cell phone or a car door handle and I had to stay off my feet for a few hours as they thawed. But what has kept me warm, has kept all of us warm, is the solidarity. It has sometimes felt almost like a party, being there with many hundreds of my fellow colleagues. It’s been so affirming, so energizing. We’re all so united in this, so deeply committed to the institution and each other in ways that these administrators who jump from job to job every few years and compose soulless emails to us with freaking ChatGPT will never understand. 

If you’re feeling so inclined, please contribute to our strike fund. The administration seems really dug in and even decreased their offer by over $100,000 on Sunday, so I’m not quite so optimistic anymore that this will end quickly and we have lots of faculty, academic professionals, and staff who won’t be able to pay their rent or mortgage without support. Thanks and solidarity!!

Does a workplace function without women who deprive themselves to keep it together?

Does the world run without women who place everyone else first?

Does the sky fall if women stop breaking their backs to hold it up?

I think we all know the answers.

But here’s the question we haven’t allowed ourselves to ask:

What happens when women, collectively, decide to stop giving ourselves to systems that feel entitled to our sacrifice?

It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Look closely at most libraries, and you’ll probably find a critically important service, program, or activity that is literally sustained by a single worker’s (let’s face it, probably a woman’s) passion. Whether it’s tutorials, assessment, OER and textbook affordability, copyright, outreach and marketing, scholarly communications, instructional technology, or something else, these things usually start as the passion of an individual library worker and grow into something essential to the institution. Sometimes, that growth happens without that work ever becoming part of the library worker’s formal job description and without release from any of their other regular duties that already made up a full workload. Some institutions might create a coordinator role to support this work, which, while not ideal (see the Library Loon’s old writings on coordinator syndrome), at least provides the library worker with time. Those who continue this work with no release from other job duties scrounge for interstitial moments to invest themselves in this work they are so passionate about or they let the work bleed into their free time – frequently the latter.

Lots of library workers have passions that are relevant to their jobs, but rarely do those become an important part of the library’s work. I used to have a colleague who was obsessed with podcasting. He would implore faculty to create podcasting assignments rather than traditional papers and pushed podcasting in committees he served on. Another colleague did amazing work with faculty around Reading Apprenticeship. While I learned quite a bit from her work that informed my teaching, it did not end up integrated into our information literacy instruction program. Early in my career, I was very passionate about social media (I shudder to think of that today), but I always saw it as something I did “on the side.” While I did implement some social media tools in my first job, it was never integral to the library and it also wasn’t time-consuming by any stretch.

These other things are different. They become essential parts – sometimes even required parts, like in the case of assessment work – of the library’s portfolio of work. They are often valued by faculty and students. They are frequently even seen as important by library administrators. Yet somehow they are not important enough to support in any concrete way. Because no one has to. Because they have someone dedicated enough to twist themselves into a pretzel and overwork to make it happen.

Those who’ve known me a long time will know that supporting online learners has been my specialty and passion since I entered this field. I started creating video tutorials in 2004 before I even had a professional position and it helped me get my first academic job as a distance learning librarian. I have a lot of experience and expertise in online instruction, both as a librarian and an online LIS instructor. While my role since 2014 has been more of a generic “liaison librarian/reference and instruction librarian,” I was still for many years the default “tutorial librarian” at work because it’s what I’m good at and passionate about. Early on, I got grant funding to build tutorials with a team (though I did all the technical parts of building them) and while it paid for some of my time to create the tutorials, later, I was expected to maintain them. And, as I found time, I continued building general-use tutorials to support our students and my colleagues’ teaching, even though it wasn’t explicitly my job to do so and I didn’t get release time for the work. I did it because there was a need and I wanted to be useful, I loved the work, and I was also surrounded by plenty of colleagues who also normalized overworking in the absence of support. Sometimes, I’d beg for people to cover a couple of my reference shifts to give me a few extra hours – like when a writing instructor asked me to build a Google Scholar tutorial and I wanted to make a good general one that would work in any discipline – but mostly, I just let the work bleed into my personal time. And I recognize that I did this to myself because I love the creativity of online instructional design work and I care deeply about online learners. It was a choice to overwork like this.

I always thought that I could make my colleagues recognize the importance of this work by making the work important; by showing how integral it could be to academic curricula. I shared one department’s data that found that students in Anthropology 101 who completed a tutorial I created for their final research assignment scored 50% better on an outcomes assessment of their term papers than 101 students who did not. I remember thinking at the time, wow! This data is irrefutable! Information literacy tutorials can really impact student learning in a major way! This is going to change everything! And nothing changed. Having a library video tutorial with over 58,000 views didn’t matter either. People appreciated the tutorials I made and would tell me that they believed that the work was important, but never to the point where I or anyone else would be given the time to focus on it. And given the amount of time it takes to build and maintain quality tutorials, the work was simply unsustainable given the other things I was expected to do.

After getting turned down when asking for just 32 hours of release time over an entire academic year to work on building a design philosophy, best practices, and plan for supporting the work of tutorial development and maintenance across the library, it became obvious to me that my boss and our department would never support making time for this work so long as I continued to squeeze the work into my already overstuffed job. So I stepped away from it and set healthier boundaries. I would only continue to maintain tutorials that were explicitly for my liaison areas, like our PsycINFO video and the interactive tutorials I made for classes in the social sciences. When we had to move to the new EBSCO database interface, I told my boss that I could only create a new version of my Academic Search Complete video with explicit release time. She never responded (?!) so I never updated it. After faculty complaints a few months later, the work was forced on a non-faculty colleague – and good friend – in Digital Services, which was shitty and made me feel shitty too. After a lot of conversations about our frustrations, she has also let go of a lot of responsibilities and set healthier boundaries, which I applaud. So who will update these tutorials next time around? Who knows!

The thing I constantly tell myself – and others – is that it’s not an individual worker’s responsibility to fill gaps created by poor leadership or organizational dysfunction. If a leader is going to brag to their superiors about the impact of our tutorials but then do nothing to provide support for their creation and maintenance, the workers shouldn’t feel like it’s their responsibility to create or maintain them. If one’s colleagues link to your tutorials and share them with students but never identify the creation of tutorials as a departmental priority (and I’m not blaming them; the issue feels far more systemic), then it’s not worth twisting yourself up into a pretzel and giving up personal time in an effort to make them. The cognitive dissonance was exasperating. Though I knew my stepping back wasn’t likely to change anything, it was an effort to stop enabling the dysfunction and to stop hurtling towards burnout. 

Sometimes you have to surrender yourself to the reality of the situation instead of constantly fighting against the current. Did it suck? Yes. Did I feel like I was abandoning students when I set those boundaries? 100%. Did I also feel guilt because I knew some colleagues were still overworking in their un-or-under-recognized roles? Sure, though I’m cognizant of the fact that I can’t control the choices of others, only mine. But was building tutorials the only way for me to help students? Of course not. Surrendering isn’t giving up. Instead of fighting the current, you find a way to move with it. Because the other thing I always tell myself is that no matter how much we work, there will always be unmet needs in our communities. I say that to myself to discourage overworking, but also, it means that there are always other ways to make a difference.

Since then, I’ve found places to contribute that will have a major impact on our students and aren’t bleeding me dry (yet?). I’ve taken a leadership role in our collections work and have been leading several projects to support our students for whom English is not their first language. Last year we did a needs assessment of Spanish-speakers (the College is moving towards becoming a Hispanic-Serving Institution), bought a ton of popular reading materials in Spanish, and translated a lot of our instructional materials into Spanish including building LibGuides in Spanish (after creating this and another guide in Spanish, I realized that this was another place where I had to set a firm boundary because I was doing a lot of translation work that really should not be my job – old habits die hard). I’m also leading a project to create World Languages collections at each of our campus libraries. 

Like tutorials work, this is a labor of love, but it’s not a solo project. It can’t happen without collaboration with technical and access services. I love this work because I’ve gotten to collaborate with folks in every area of the library as well as people outside who support international students. I love playing the role of project manager and cheerleader. We were just awarded an LSTA mini-grant to help build our collection and I’m excited to get experience buying books in non-English languages beyond Spanish. Is this project adding to my workload? Yes. But because it’s more recognized than tutorials work as a “library project,” I’ve been better able to say no to other work. And, unlike tutorials, there isn’t as much time pressure. Other than fiscal deadlines, the work can much more easily be spread out and done in free moments here and there. I’m really glad I could find a space where I could make a difference and the work is collaborative, challenging, creative, valuable, and sustainable.

The Buddhists say that pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. I know that well as someone with chronic pain and illness (and I practice a lot of surrendering to how I am feeling day-to-day as my health upends my best laid plans), but I also feel it very much with the choices I make at work. The first step is acknowledging that I do have choices. Knowing when to keep pushing against the current and when to surrender is an art and something most of us struggle with. Part of it is recognizing the things that we can’t control or even influence and letting go of the idea that if we grind hard enough, impress the powers-that-be enough, things will change. Stop offering free labor. Invest yourself in ways that enrich you rather than deplete you and set boundaries that keep you from overworking. 

If you are toiling in an informal and unsupported role at your library, I see you. I know that there may be reasons some of you can’t give up what you’re doing, like being on the tenure track, worrying about not getting merit raises, etc., though even for you, setting boundaries around other work you do (projects and committees) might still be possible. But for those who are less constrained, choosing not to do something that is burning you out and isn’t supported isn’t a betrayal of your patrons. If this work is that important, it’s your institution that has betrayed patrons by not adequately supporting you. It’s not the job of an individual worker to prop up a dysfunctional system. It’s not the job of the worker to continue sacrificing themselves on the altar of vocational awe (Rest in Power, Fobazi Ettarh, and thank you). Your job is not entitled to more than your contract or job description promises. If there are not enough hours in the day to do everything, then everything can’t get done. The role of a manager is to help their direct reports prioritize their work and figure out what not to do. If something is important enough, they need to find a way to make sure it gets done with the resources (people and funds) they have.

What I really hate is the toll that all of this takes on the passionate, dedicated worker and on the organization when that bright light finally burns out. I was recently in a meeting of an assessment-related college committee I have been on for about 9 years. Some of the faculty who have been part of this group the whole time have gone from being the most active and passionate contributors to our college to jaded, angry, and burned out husks of their former selves. One of the people on the committee previously was a major leader in this work and put so much into it because she believed in it. Her department has 1/3 the number of full-time faculty that they had when she started at the college, yet they are still expected to do the same level of service and to meet all the administrative demands for assessment work and other administrivia (actually there’s more administrivia these days) that they did 15 years ago. After years of this, plus the complete disdain many of our administrators have shown toward faculty and staff, she now sees the assessment work we do as meaningless box-checking and suggests putting as little effort as possible into it. I can’t disagree, not at all, and I feel the same way about the college at this point, but it breaks my heart to see people I thought of as the most brilliant, passionate stars of the College burned to a crisp by such mistreatment and the expectation that we should keep filling these holes that administrators purposely create. 

I have another colleague who does so much library outreach on social media and elsewhere on top of her regular job duties. She is amazing at it – a natural marketing whiz. She’s a brilliant, funny, and engaging communicator in ways I couldn’t ever hope to be. She told me she hopes that our Dean will make it her job and give her release time to do it and it hurts my heart because I know it won’t happen. While I truly love working with her (she is a JOY!) it would serve us right if some other library scooped her up to run their library marketing and outreach program. And I wonder when she will tire of doing this work that isn’t part of her job description and that she isn’t given release time to do. I hope it happens before she burns out because I’d hate for her to lose her passion and her shine. We all deserve to keep (or get back) our shine. 

Ask yourselves, what happens when women we, collectively, decide to stop giving ourselves to systems that feel entitled to our sacrifice? What would surrendering look like in your worklife?

However, unlike when you’re immersed in a new country and culture, you’re falling into this new place and experiencing that painfully slow acculturation while you’re trying to still live your regular life in parallel. You’re expected to be a good parent, partner, family member, friend, employee, housekeeper, bill-payer, etc. But you’re living in two different realities now and because of that, it’s easy to feel alienated from your regular life, especially if you don’t feel like you can bring that other part of yourself to your interactions at work, at home, or out with friends. The cognitive dissonance can be jarring.

It’s hard enough to live that double life, but adding in the vagaries of seeking out a diagnosis and often not being believed, not to mention coping with the symptoms themselves, can make life feel completely untenable. Before my autoimmune diagnosis, I spent more than a year seeing medical professionals who didn’t believe there was anything wrong with me other than the normal discomforts of aging. I kept asking doctors if they thought my symptoms could be autoimmune and was told “no” over and over again, though that felt wrong to me. One PA suggested that some of my symptoms might stem from anxiety since I have a history of anxiety (like I wouldn’t know at this point what anxiety feels like). Within five minutes of talking with the first rheumatologist I saw, after waiting five months for the appointment, he said to me “this doesn’t sound rheumatological at all.” Luckily he still did all the standard testing which showed that he was very wrong. But not being believed by so many doctors for so long stays with you. It leaves a scar. Every time I see a doctor now, I feel like I’m going to court and I’m ready to be cross-examined, to be picked apart. I’m a bundle of nerves.

And my experience is painfully common, especially for women, as poet Meghan O’Rourke writes in her amazing book about chronic illness, The Invisible Kingdom (a meditation on and journalistic exploration of chronic illness and how it is positioned in our social fabric):

And so it is a truth universally acknowledged among the chronically ill that a young woman in possession of vague symptoms like fatigue and pain will be in search of a doctor who believes she is actually sick. More than 45 percent of autoimmune disease patients, a survey by the Autoimmune Association found, “have been labeled hypochondriacs in the earliest stages of their illness.” Of the nearly one hundred women I interviewed, all of whom were eventually diagnosed with an autoimmune disease or another concrete illness, more than 90 percent had been encouraged to seek treatment for anxiety or depression by doctors who told them nothing physical was wrong with them. (p. 103)

Once I got on meds for my condition that finally started working (most first-line meds for autoimmune conditions take three months on average to produce any effects on the immune system), I thought I was past the worst of it. Other than occasional much smaller flares, I was essentially in remission. I learned my limits. I protected my spoons with my life. I kept my stress low. I felt like I had it figured out. I felt good even. And then I got sicker with new symptoms that have stolen so much from me, including my sleep. The past 10 months have honestly been a nightmare with a carousel of doctors who all have completely different theories of what is going on and with a condition that is constantly evolving so what they see in the moment isn’t the full picture. And each doctor I’ve seen hyperfocuses on something different and ignores every other aspect of my case. It’s all making me feel like I’m going crazy. 

Each wrong diagnosis brought me to another country, another reality, another identity, that I lived in for a short while. And in each of these countries, I spent countless hours learning, learning, learning all I could, going down research and subreddit rabbit holes, and spending way too much money on products that did nothing because none of those diagnoses were correct. The dermatologist I see who specializes in autoimmune conditions at a research university seems to have given up even trying to diagnose me and she’s basically my last best hope in the state. She wouldn’t even give me differential diagnoses last time beyond “it’s clearly autoimmune given your systemic symptoms.” She’s the one who has put me on a serious immunosuppressant with debilitating side effects, which I guess at least shows she’s taking it seriously, but if she doesn’t know what she’s treating me for, how does she know that this drug that is making me feel terrible is even going to help? Atul Gawande said of doctors that “nothing is more threatening to who you think you are than a patient with a problem you cannot solve” (quoted in The Invisible Kingdom, page 209) and I feel that in how I’m treated at every appointment I go to. With the exception of the charlatan immunologist who was desperate to diagnose me with MCAS though there was no evidence in support of it, not one doctor has seemed at all interested in figuring out what this is – it’s felt more like a game of “not it.”

Of a similar liminal moment in her own illness, O’Rourke wrote, “in my illness I was moored in an unreachable northern realm, exiled to an invisible kingdom, and it made me angry. I wanted to rejoin the throngs. In dark moments I continued to wonder if the wrongness was me” (99). And of course people will feel like that wrongness is them when we live in a culture that views chronic illness as some sort of weakness or something we caused through through our own bad habits. Like O’Rourke, I feel both exiled from my world and forced to be in it at the same time, which is a unique form of torture. Going to work, pretending things are ok, doing my job, meeting deadlines, helping students, smiling, all the while my body is attacking itself, I’m barely sleeping, I’m spontaneously bleeding from my skin and under my skin, and I’m so itchy I sometimes have to wear gloves to bed or I’ll scratch myself raw in my sleep. You feel like you’re play-acting being yourself, being a person in the world, because you’re not really there anymore. And when you’re suffering, and don’t know what your illness is, and you feel abandoned, it’s easy to go down rabbit holes of self-loathing along with those rabbit holes of fruitless research that make you feel like an unhinged obsessive with a murder board and yarn. As Meghan O’Rourke wrote, “your sense of story is disrupted” (p. 259) and you feel like a stranger to yourself.

I started writing about slow librarianship long before I got really sick, but even then, I knew the importance of fostering a work culture where you can be a whole person. I knew how it felt to have a child and feel like you couldn’t prioritize family obligations over work ever (though working during family time? Totally ok, right?). In a workplace that encourages people to be whole people, workers feel like they can prioritize the things in their lives outside of work that are important – their caregiving responsibilities, their health, the people they love, etc. They feel like they can talk about these things – that they don’t make them liabilities. They can be vulnerable and real. And feeling like you can be vulnerable and real about who you are and how you’re doing means that you can also be vulnerable and real in your work, which makes us better employees who are energized to try new things.

I think a lot of people in positions of power might even want a culture like this, but very few actively create it. They might think that saying “take what time you need” when someone is facing illness is enough. But I think two pieces are missing from this. First, managers need to not only say “take what time you need” but work with their direct reports to address the work that would otherwise pile up. If you say “take all the time you need” but all the work with its stressors and deadlines is still there, you’re not really giving people space. Can you take good care of yourself while you watch the work pile up and up and up? How many of us have come back to work while still not fully recovered from an illness because of the work that was piling up or a class they needed to teach? 

Also, managers need to model vulnerability, transparency, and being whole people themselves. If they put up a false front of strength, if they’re not willing to be vulnerable and human and real themselves, if they do not model transparency, there’s no way that others will feel safe doing so. I was lucky to have a boss in my first academic library job who was deeply human in her interactions with her employees, so I got to see what that looked like. And it was her humanity that engendered fierce loyalty in her employees – we all thought the world of her. Even when she made decisions that people didn’t like (which was rare as she really did take our insights to heart), she explained her thinking in a transparent way. Given my later experiences, her way of being feels vanishingly rare. I think a lot of managers feel like they need to project strength, not explain their decisions, not let their direct reports really know them as people with full lives, but I don’t think that’s true. A lot of managers operate out of a place of fear or insecurity, but my first academic library director was confident enough to be her full self, flaws and all. 

In a culture where we don’t feel like we can bring ourselves fully to work, I don’t feel like I can talk about my illness. I feel selfish and weak for even considering it. Like, we all have shit going on, right? The world is pretty awful right now. People’s lives are complicated and messy and there’s probably a lot of suffering I know nothing about happening all around me. If they don’t talk about it, who am I to talk about it? I’m not special. While I’ve mentioned being sick at work in the context of being immunocompromised and needing to protect myself and not participate in large, crowded events, even that has felt really uncomfortable. Everyone should feel like they are important enough to their places of work and valued enough to bring up these things without feeling embarrassed or like they’re asking for “special treatment.” I read recently (can’t remember the source) that close to 60% of people with chronic illnesses have not told people at work about it. Imagine hiding something that is such a pivotal and ineluctable piece of many people’s identities and think about the double life that forces them to live.

At work I feel a lot of shame about being sick and I work more than I should given how I’ve been feeling (this is common). I feel like I need to mask how I’m really doing, that people don’t want to hear it. And it’s true that most don’t. There are three people at work I can talk to about my illness, but others seem so incredibly uncomfortable when I mention it, so I’ve learned to just pretend it’s all ok or say nothing. I know that some of my reticence and shame comes from my own internalized ableism as it’s the water we all swim in, but when I worked in that library where the culture encouraged vulnerability, humanity, and care, I remember how different it felt. How much less distance there was between the person I really was and the person I was at work.  

In a meeting last year, our Dean was talking about making the next all-library meeting in-person only. Previously, they had always offered them hybrid, but she didn’t like that most people were choosing not to come in-person. And I totally get it, even though it sucks to always be the outlier. She wants it to be a team-building experience and that’s really hard to do when most people are participating from home with their cameras off. At that meeting, for the first time, I disclosed my illness in front of a bunch of people and talked about how important it is to always offer an online option for folks who are medically vulnerable or at least find ways to make indoor spaces safer for those who can’t afford to get sick. My boss then asked to meet with me to talk about how to make our spaces safer. I talked about airflow, encouraging and providing masks, and, during temperate months, having the meetings at places where windows and doors can remain open or even holding them outside (we’d had one meeting at a park a few years ago which had been the best one ever from both a health and team-building perspective). I suggested that we make the Winter meeting fully virtual since it’s the height of flu season and you can usually get people participating more in a fully virtual meeting than a hybrid one, where the online people feel like weird lurkers. I was thanked for my feedback and didn’t hear anything after that. This September, the all-library meeting was held in our campus library where the windows don’t open (albeit with a couple of HEPA filters scattered around, but I know we do have large college spaces where doors and windows can be opened because I went to an all-day union meeting in one where they did just that and we’d used that space for library meetings in the past) and our February meeting is going to be held in-person during the worst flu season in decades. Obviously, none of this was personal or intended to cause harm, but, at the same time, how should I feel under the circumstances? Clearly speaking out in that meeting, something that I had to really steel myself to do, had been pointless. Why would I ever bring it up or ask for anything again?

When we come back from winter break, people inevitably ask each other how it was, but do they really want to know? I think they want to hear “good,” “fun,” “restful,” etc. How do you talk about a “vacation” in which you spent most of it doubled over in pain after eating anything thanks to the toxic meds you have to take and your father-in-law was in the hospital dying the entire time? I wish that I felt I could share what an absolute shitshow it’s been, to feel like I could be a full person at work, but when you know no one really wants to hear it, when it just makes people uncomfortable, it becomes so much easier to smile and say “it was good!” and move on. Who wants to be a buzzkill? 

Slow librarianship puts worker well-being over productivity and deadlines, allows workers to be whole people at work, and supports a culture of care. While a radical idea, this even makes good business sense because depleted and burned out workers have been shown to be a major drain on the organization and negatively impact the culture. If you’re a manager and you’re not actively fostering a culture where people can bring their whole selves to work, then you are fostering a culture where people do not feel safe being vulnerable and having needs. Workers, if you know a colleague is struggling with something (an illness, losing a loved one, a difficult caregiving situation, etc.) and you don’t check in to see how things have been going for them, you’re sending the message that you don’t want to hear about these things, that they make you uncomfortable, that they’re not appropriate to take to work. I think we’ve all probably been guilty of this at some point in our lives and maybe we even thought that not asking was the right thing to do. I can imagine some people think that asking is invasive or reminds the person that they are sick, but it is an expression of care. As Philip Hoover writes in his excellent Sick Times article entitled “You know someone with Long COVID. They need you to ask about it genuinely” 

Approach us with empathy and curiosity. Ask questions that show a sincere desire to understand. How are you feeling this week? works because it acknowledges the chronic, fluctuating nature of my health. Or a version of Nunez’s question, and one I’ve longed to be asked since I’ve been ill: What has this been like for you? 

If our response is tough to hear, try not to smother it in optimism. And tread lightly. While some long-haulers may appear okay in public, much of our suffering occurs in private, shade-drawn rooms, across lonely afternoons, stuck in bed. When in doubt, remember that the act of asking never hurts — but never being asked certainly does.

While I don’t have Long COVID, this piece so perfectly encapsulates how I feel as someone with a mostly invisible chronic illness who would just love to be asked “how are you feeling this week?” instead of feeling like I have to pretend I’m okay. I told my manager at the start of Fall term that my autoimmune disease had become significantly worse and that I didn’t know what my capacity might look like going forward. She expressed sympathy, told me to take what time I needed, and never checked in with me after that. That September, I was taking over a very important committee chair role that was made enormously more time-consuming and onerous by the departure of the three colleagues most involved in supporting this work (two of whom had more than 20 years of institutional knowledge locked up in their heads). I didn’t feel like I had the leeway or support to let things drop as more and more kept piling up on my plate related to my chair role and it became clear that I was expected to do a lot of onboarding for the new people in this role even though I was new to my role and was no one’s manager. While I know my boss is extraordinarily busy, the message that not checking in with how I was doing sent me was very different from what I assume she’d wanted to convey. Checking in with a colleague or direct report seems like such a small thing, and it is in terms of the effort it requires, but the impact it can have in making someone feel cared for and less like they have to live a painful double life is enormous.

For those of you with disabilities, spoon theory is probably quite familiar. We only have so many spoons each day – so much capacity for deep thought, stress, physical exertion, and even social interaction before we crash. And crashing often leads to further disability – for example, overexerting myself one day could (and has) lead to a flare of pain, fatigue, and a host of other symptoms that lasts weeks or even a month. So we try to plan our lives around leaving a few spoons in reserve each day, because stuff comes up, right? Our kid tells us as we’re going to bed that they need help with a project that’s due tomorrow. Our colleague is unable to do their part for a presentation we’re supposed to give together tomorrow and we need to figure out how to deliver their part as well. Our spouse gets sick and we have to take care of everything at home on our own. You can’t plan for everything and it’s inevitable that there will be times when you’re going to use up all your spoons and then some, but learning to plan around your capacity and leave some in reserve is a critical skill for those of us with disabilities. And learning how many spoons we have for different types of activities is a process and one that feels like building a sandcastle next to the water at low-tide. It’s an ever-changing endless process.

Even if you don’t live with disabling conditions, I can promise you that you only have so many spoons for each day. If you have a bad tension headache at the end of a workday, if your mind is racing when you try to go to sleep, if your shoulders are knotted and tight, if you’re snapping at the people you love because you’re all out of patience when you get home, if you’re so mentally exhausted that you can’t even make a simple decision like what to eat… those (and others) are signs that you have pushed yourself too hard. Even if you’re not disabled, pushing yourself beyond your capacity disables you, at least temporarily. It makes you less capable of reflection, attention, patience, and solid decision-making. As I’ve mentioned in the past, having too much on our plates (called “time poverty”  in the literature) has been shown to increase our risk of anxiety and depression. And repeatedly pushing yourself too hard puts you at much greater risk of burnout. Whether you are disabled or not, there are consequences for working beyond your capacity. 

And yet, so many of us overwork. For some of us, that’s more the norm than the rare exception, to the point where we see doing our contracted amount of work as underperforming, as lazy, as letting people down. Instead of looking at our to-do lists and seeing that we’re being asked to do way more than is reasonable, we assume that we just need to find new ways to become more productive. Because the failure must be ours, not the system of work that keeps intensifying, and asking us to do more and become expert in more and more things. 

And being productive is a seductive thing, especially for people who have self-esteem issues. If you feel you’re not enough, meeting deadlines and getting things done can make you feel good about yourself temporarily. But it can easily become more about chasing the dopamine hit that comes from completing a task than about doing something meaningful. I think a lot of productivity is that way — feeling busy and getting things done can make us feel useful. If we’re busy, we must be worthwhile, right? It’s sort of a hedge against our existential worries. I must be a good person if I’m getting all these things done on time!

I’ve come to recognize that I feel a strong need to show people that I’m a person who lives up to their commitments and respects other people’s schedules and needs. Basically, I want to be liked, probably (definitely) to an unhealthy extent, and I spend a lot of time worrying that I’m inconveniencing or pissing off others. A library is very much an interdependent ecosystem where one person’s failure to complete a task can impact the timelines and workloads of others. For example, I’ve seen the negative impact that waiting until the end of the fiscal year to do the bulk of one’s book ordering has on our Technical Services staff. I don’t want to be the sort of person who causes stress for another colleague. That said, I think I’m a bit compulsive about my reliability to the point where I put completing tasks on time (even relatively unimportant ones) over my own wellbeing. 

I think how we treat productivity comes from the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. I grew up hearing that I was a uniquely terrible kid and thinking I was inherently unlovable, and while I’ve become much more confident in myself, that assumption still hangs over me and colors my interpretation of everything. I think it’s very hard to feel deserving of rest when you are worried about what your colleagues will think if you have to rely on them because you can’t get x or y done. If you think you’re an inherently good person who is just as deserving of kindness and grace as anyone else at work, I imagine it would be a lot easier to do what you need to stay well.

I was extremely sick and was barely sleeping from March through July and I only took one day of sick leave because I felt like I needed to get all the tasks done before the end of the academic year (I’m on a 9-month contract). And it truly did take me every single one of those days I had left to complete everything. Would it have been the end of the world if I’d taken some sick leave to rest and came back to some of the projects in September? No. But I was also feeling a lot of guilt about needing people to cover for me for certain parts of my job in the Spring due to my new illness and felt the need to overcompensate by being super-productive. 

I want to feel comfortable not completing things. I want to feel ok looking at to-do lists that I know I won’t complete at the end of the term or the year. I want to feel like I can take a sick day if I’ve slept only a few hours, even if it’s last minute and means my reference shift may not be covered. I want to be ok with letting people down if it means safeguarding my well-being. What’s really stunning is that I have much better boundaries than I used to and they are still fairly pathetic. I don’t take on nearly as much as I used to. I’m ok with saying no. I’m far better at conserving my energy and paying attention to my capacity on any particular day. And yet, I have so far to go, especially as I get sicker.

Last week, my family was visiting colleges in the Northeast. On Thursday, I had to wake up around 2am East Coast time, fly all the way back to the West Coast, and, since I arrived home around 10:30am Pacific time, I felt like I had a whole day to get household chores done, in spite of the fact that I was absolutely wrecked (that productivity urge is really ingrained in me). Instead, I spent the bulk of the day on the couch watching TV, went to sleep at 6:45pm, and have no regrets. It wasn’t laziness that kept me on the couch; it was the right treatment for my body and mind. We need to stop feeling guilt for giving our bodies and minds the comfort and rest they need. 

Do we call taking a medication that we need for our survival “giving in?” What if we treated rest as a productive act like exercise? What if we saw rest as protecting our capacity; our overall ability to show up at work and in our lives? What if we saw it as being as integral to our health as the medications we take? And why are we so willing to cheat ourselves out of rest, often for things that in the long-run are not that important?

It’s one thing for me to take the rest I need at home, another entirely to do it when it will impact my colleagues (and, to be clear, I have amazingly lovely and generous colleagues who all support and cover for one another when life inevitably smacks us in the face). I need to keep reminding myself that it’s better for my workplace to have a healthy, happy colleague who is committed to the work and sometimes needs to take time off to stay healthy than a burnt out husk of a colleague. I need to remind myself that I won’t be able to be reflective, creative, or a solid decision-maker if I am too depleted. In the end, rest is integral to my doing my job well, as it is for all of you. You’re doing a service to your place of work when you take the time you need to rest and get/stay healthy because it makes you better at your job.

If you feel like you’re overworking, that you can’t slow down when you need rest, if you feel guilty for taking sick days when you need them, if you rely on getting things done for your self-worth, it’s worth interrogating the stories you tell about yourself and your work. Is whatever you’re going to do that day really more important than your health and, if so, are you really the only one who can do it? Do you give your colleagues grace when they are sick and take the time they need or if they miss a deadline because they have too many competing demands? Why can’t you extend that same grace to yourself? Why do you think you’re not deserving? (I find it sometimes helps to think of myself in the third person and imagine how I’d feel if my colleague needed whatever it is I do.) And if your workplace sucks and someone is going to resent you for doing what you need to do to take care of yourself, the problem is with them, not you. You deserve rest. We all do.

In the middle of all of this, I had a colleague take their frustration with the overwork they have been experiencing in their job out on me in a deeply mean and sarcastic email that left me literally shaking and in tears. While, upon reflection, I could see that their outburst wasn’t really about me (and they did apologize later – well, for the tone of their email), it was clear from the email that they thought they were the only one with a high workload, the only person struggling, while people like me weren’t actually working hard at all. I don’t doubt that their workload is unreasonably high, but that isn’t the fault of non-managers like me since I can’t dictate other people’s workloads. But also, that day I was working a full day on two hours of sleep after well over a month of nights like that. I’d also gotten one of the (possibly wrong, though still in the mix) diagnoses just hours before and this one was an incurable and life-threatening condition. I felt like I was falling apart, but was still showing up and trying to do my best. This colleague didn’t know that, but they shouldn’t have had to. We’ve had a friendly relationship for eleven years and that should have earned me some charitable reading. 

We should never, ever, assume that other people with whom we work have it better than us or are doing less than us. It’s nearly impossible to know what our colleagues’ workloads look like. Maybe they are working harder than you are. Maybe they’re doing a lot less. Maybe they are also an overburdened caregiver, or are dealing with a chronic illness, or are going through a messy divorce, or have a parent who is dying, or are dealing with severe depression and are barely keeping their head above water. Some people loudly share their busyness like it’s a badge of honor, humble-bragging about the number of meetings they have in a day or the number of projects they are working on or the number of appointments they have with students, but most people just do their jobs as best they can and don’t broadcast any of it. Most of our work is invisible. No one but me and the members of the committee I chair (and now all of you!) know that the report I’ll be sending out on Monday describing the results of a survey we did of Spanish speakers at my college was 98% my work (even though there are six people total on the committee and I did ask for help at several points in the process – ok, now I am complaining) so that massive lift is largely invisible. The reality in libraries and in most knowledge work is that you’ll never really know for sure how hard everyone around you is working and, if you’re their peer, there’s no reason to even contemplate it. Comparison is toxic. It makes you brittle and resentful. It also feeds into scarcity thinking. Work isn’t a competition. Focus on doing your best work and set boundaries that keep you from taking on more than you can handle. 

But I do get it. I remember when I was addicted to overwork, I felt resentful towards colleagues who I felt were not working as hard as I was. But it wasn’t their fault that I was overworking. Overworking is both a personal choice and a management failure. Given the tremendous organizational costs of burnout, managers should be protecting their direct reports from overwork, but I’ve never once had a boss who did. I’ve never had a boss tell me I was doing enough or question my taking on another project or committee, but I’ve certainly had bosses ask me to do more when I already felt overloaded or refuse to help me prioritize or jettison things when I had too much on my plate. Having more on your plate than you could reasonably do, known as time poverty in the literature, has actually been shown to increase the risk of depression and anxiety in employees. Even if you have good boundaries, time poverty is a stressful and erosive thing because we all naturally want to please people and meet deadlines. We don’t want to fail. But giving people more than they can reasonably do in their job sets them up for constant feelings of personal failure and resentment towards others whom they perceive as having less on their plates (whether that is true or not). If you’re trying to burn your employees out, ensuring they are in a constant state of time poverty is the perfect recipe.

When I was a manager, I saw part of my role as making sure my direct reports weren’t taking on too much – and I had a really passionate bunch of direct reports, so the struggle was real! I remember talking with one employee about a committee she wanted to join and asking her if she really felt being on it was worth the additional workload. In the end, she realized it wasn’t. So many of us are always haunted by a nagging feeling that we aren’t doing enough, even when we’ve probably already taken on too much. For me, it feels like the ghost of my work addiction calling to me, and I find myself constantly battling against its siren song. A good manager should be there to support you in that. If you have too much on your plate and your manager is not helping you lighten the load, they have failed you. Don’t take it out on your non-manager peers who probably have their own workload stressors.

I have a friend at the library whose workload has ballooned, but she is working to set healthy boundaries. She has let go of some things or told people that things will just take longer. She’s managing expectations brilliantly. When the work day is done for her, it’s done. She and I are both people-pleasers who are trying to set better boundaries at work and I have found her approach really inspiring. I still do worry too much about letting people down, even as my body falls apart around me. But I look back on pre-pandemic me and I am proud of the progress I’ve made. And I can see now that having healthier boundaries made me a better colleague because I don’t compare workloads and I don’t feel any resentment toward anyone. We’re all contributing as best we can to supporting students at our college. We’re all doing good work. We all deserve grace.

But now my relationship with that colleague who took their frustrations out on me is totally broken. I do forgive them because I feel compassion for their situation, but I don’t know how I  can ever feel safe around them again. We used to have a cheerful, friendly bantering kind of working relationship, but I’m always going to be scared and trepidatious in our interactions now. I’m always going to worry about setting them off. I still feel sick over the whole thing. And that sucks.

Let’s remember that when there are workload inequities or when the load on us feels too great, it’s either our fault for taking on more than we can handle, the fault of our managers for not protecting us from overwork and burnout, or a combination of the two. It is not the fault of colleagues who have better boundaries. It is not the fault of colleagues who know when they are doing enough and know how to say “no.” It is not the fault of colleagues who put work aside at the end of the workday, even if they didn’t get things done. Those people should be admired and emulated. The only people who benefit from us sniping at our colleagues are the managers who are neglecting their duty of care to their employees by not ensuring they don’t have more on their plates than they can reasonably handle. 

This isn’t the essay I was planning to publish next. I’ve been working on an essay about the lack of solidarity around COVID protection, but this is very much related. While I’ve been very sick since 2022, when I had my first COVID infection and then Long COVID, I came back from sabbatical in April 2024 with a diagnosis of an autoimmune condition and on medication that is designed to suppress my immune response. Since then, I have struggled to figure out how to erect boundaries that protect my health and keep me from having a flare, which means ensuring both that I don’t exhaust myself (mentally or physically) and that I don’t put myself in situations where there’s a good likelihood of my getting sick.

Something I’ve been struggling a lot with is when to say “no” when there is an in-person event at work — whether it’s an student outreach program, a meeting, a class, or something else. Sometimes these are fully optional things, sometimes they are things where volunteers are requested, and sometimes they are things where I’m straight-up expected to go. In most cases, my holding to a boundary and saying no means more work for someone else. More and more of our meetings now that worked fine online are going back to face-to-face. Sometimes I get the awkward experience of being one of a few people on Zoom in a mostly F2F meeting, but even those opportunities are dwindling. Once or twice I took a sick day rather than be forced to either take a risk that was unacceptable to me. There are a lot of things I don’t volunteer for anymore and I feel like that’s being noticed. And it’s not exactly fair to my colleagues when other campuses have all of their librarians participating in face-to-face outreach activities and mine has two COVID-cautious people. It makes me feel like I’m not being a “team player.”

The irony is that, pre-COVID, I was the librarian on my campus most likely to volunteer to do outreach events. I did lots of tabling, presented at a bunch of student and faculty orientations, and even organized library tabling at events like our Theatre program’s performances. I love love love interacting with our community. During the height of COVID, the one thing that gave me life was meeting with students on Zoom for research help. The fact that I’m putting my health first doesn’t mean I don’t care as much about students. It doesn’t mean I’m not dedicated to my job or a “team player.” If I’m dead or further disabled, I can’t help anyone. I still teach in-person classes (masked and with the door always open) and I have a weekly shift at the reference desk, but I also make online tutorials, am embedded in online classes, do virtual reference, and teach Zoom sessions for online synchronous classes. What I find strange is that things like making tutorials and supporting online classes seem to be considered optional while much of the face-to-face stuff is treated like it’s required. In a perfect world, we’d all contribute in our own ways based on our strengths, limitations, and passions, but it feels like that extends to some library work (the stuff I do most) and not other library work (the stuff that puts me at greatest risk).

I spent the first 15 years of my career with extremely porous boundaries if I had any at all. I’d been so programmed by my childhood to believe that I was a terrible, unloveable human being and that I had to make up for it by working hard and pleasing everyone. I think a lot of people-pleasers have a critic in their heads who tells them that they are a horrible person if they disappoint anyone. If a random stranger online doesn’t like you? If you have to set a boundary that supports your well-being but means saying no to a colleague? Well, that just proves what a piece of shit you are. Because I thought so badly of myself, I was plagued by the idea that I was never doing enough. So I always felt pressure to do all the things. I raised my hand and said yes to everything. I basically made librarianship my job, my hobby, my life. Work bled completely into my home life. And it wasn’t until around 2019, when I had a major health issue that had me thinking about mortality, that I started questioning how I was living my life. It wasn’t until really considered “what if you’re enough right now, just as you are?” that I was able to jump off that treadmill of striving and start unlearning those unhealthy habits and assumptions about myself.

In spite of the fact that I have done so much work on myself, my orientation towards work, and my boundaries in recent years, I feel a lot of anguish over these decisions. I think I still struggle with internalized ableism. I feel a lot of guilt that I can’t do all the same things my colleagues can, and that, when it’s an invisible disability, it’s often seen by others as a choice rather than a necessity. Because I could choose to put my health at risk (and have, in some cases out of a sense of duty). The risk is not always so clear cut and I have to be the one each time making the decision about whether something is too risky to do. And often, you’re making these decisions without all the information, like when this December, the International Student Resource Fair moved to a smaller space with many more people in attendance, which increased the risk to me exponentially. And I only found out about all that when I showed up that day and what could I do at that point? I ended up teaching an in-person class while I was on a month-long course of steroids (and so was even more immunocompromised than usual) because no one else was volunteering and I technically was available at the time (though so were others) and felt guilty. I have to make these risk-calculations every day, as do tons of other people in similar situations. There are no clear-cut guidelines for this, no metrics to easily help us navigate these decisions. I never know for sure if I’m being overly cautious or the polar opposite and someone else in the same situation may make completely different decisions. And tell me again how I’m supposed to be not exhausting myself mentally? This is another dimension of crip time that is far less liberatory than others.

Since COVID and flu cases were pretty low in my area in early December, I actually RSVP’ed yes to an end of term party for my division of the college. I’d planned to not eat and stay masked the whole time. But when I saw the huge number of people who RSVP’ed yes and I had no idea what room the celebration was being held in nor what safety precautions were being taken (from what I learned later, the answer was “none”), I decided not to go, which was a bummer because I miss socializing with my colleagues. It’s exhausting to constantly have to do this calculus for everything, to miss out on things, or to go to something that is a significant risk and feel anxiety about it. You can’t win. And then you have to deal with the perceptions of your colleagues who maybe think you’re being overly anxious or who don’t know about your condition at all and maybe think you’ve just become antisocial. But they don’t understand that the one time you actually went to a larger event in the past five years, totally masked the whole time and 6 weeks after getting vaccinated, you ended up getting COVID, which completely flattened you for almost a month. And after that, you had a horrible flare of your autoimmune condition which left you barely able to walk (and with vertigo, fatigue, neuropathy, and a host of other symptoms). And at that point, you’re then left with the choice of living in that flare for weeks or taking a course of steroids which will make you even more immunocompromised (among other side-effects) for a month or more. Your small choice of whether to go to a celebration or a student outreach event or a meeting could affect your ability to work and function for months, leaving your colleagues to pick up the pieces. They don’t have to think about these things (or they just don’t think about these things) and I wish I could do the same. I so miss just being able to go out and do stuff without a second thought! But given that I’m currently on day 6 of a flare that started because I got a tiny cold from my son that only lasted about two days, I know the consequences of that would be immense and long-lasting.

I try to remind myself that these are accessibility issues and that no one is trying to make these in-person events or meetings more accessible to people like me and to folks who are still trying to not be disabled or killed by COVID. Not all of my colleagues know about my condition, but even of those who do, no one has made an effort to make in-person events more accessible (beyond offering a remote option sometimes, which I do appreciate as much as it makes me feel awkward). People don’t put on masks around me. The spaces in which these events are held don’t have open windows or air filters. We have a big all-day in-person meeting coming up in a month and I’m already feeling anxious about it. My dean has written that she expects in-person attendance, but also made it clear to me that she didn’t mean it for people with a medical issue. Still, the thought that I’d be the only person participating remotely is filling me with a sense of dread that I can’t even describe. But the idea of being in a closed room all day with my unmasked colleagues (save one who still masks) during the height of so many winter illnesses fills me with just as much dread and is objectively more risky. More calculating – shame vs. health? The title of Geena Davis’ memoir Dying of Politeness comes to mind in this situation. Does a wheelchair user feel responsible for not attending an event only accessible by staircase? I hope not. Yet I feel all too responsible for my situation.

People who don’t have disabilities don’t know that the disability itself is only one piece of what disables us. Contending with the ableist world around us is often just as much if not more of a cause of pain, depletion, and harm. It’s in those moments that I’m most keenly aware of my disability. I spend a lot of time where I don’t think about my disabilities at all and just live my life like anyone else (just perhaps with a bit more pain), but it’s when I’m at work and in other spaces where that disability becomes an issue that I feel hyper-aware – sometimes feeling invisible, or hypervisible, or somehow both at the same time. It’s the constant calculating that we have to do about the spaces we are going to enter that I find most exhausting. I recently started Margaret Price’s Crip Spacetime (available open access, yay!) and I felt seen right from the jump. Here’s a small excerpt from the beginning:

We know what the room ­we’re ­going to looks like, and we know how to ask—­ with charm and deference—if we need the furniture rearranged, the fluorescent lights turned off, the microphone turned on. We know how much pain it will cost to remain sitting upright for the allotted time. We know how to keep track of the growing pain, or fatigue, or need to urinate (­there’s no accessible bathroom), and plan our exit with something resembling dignity. We know that no one else will ever know. What ­you’ve just read is a litany—or maybe a rant. I use it for two reasons: first, to remind ­ those who ­ haven’t performed that series of calculations that they are an everyday experience for some of us; and second, to call to ­ those for whom the litany, with little adjustment, is painfully familiar. (Price, 2024, p. 1)

I love when she writes that “crip spacetime is un/shared” (p. 29). I might be existing in the same physical space as my colleagues, but we are experiencing it differently. They may sit in the same chair at the reference desk as I do, but they may not experience it as such a malevolent presence in their lives. At home, I have a lot of control over my environment, but that’s less the case when I’m at work. The cold aggravates my Raynaud’s and makes my fingers hurt (even when wearing gloves). Sitting at the reference desk in a chair too big for my body when even under the best circumstances, I can only manage about 40 minutes of sitting in any chair before I end up in a significant amount of pain. But put me in a hard or ill-fitting chair and it’s so much worse. Right now, I work at the reference desk for no more than two hours straight, but come next term, I’ll be doing four hours, which I’m worried about. I’ve thought about seeking an accommodation so I could stand most of the time, but I can’t picture what that would look like and the cost would probably be huge given the uncompromising setup of our giant reference desk (also, going through the invasive and dehumanizing accommodation process again fills me with more dread than I can describe). Again, more calculus. I work on campus on Mondays and when I come home, I’m in pain and am so exhausted that I usually don’t feel myself again until Wednesday. I’m pretty sure my colleagues don’t need two days to recover from their day on-campus. And I don’t want to complain because I feel very lucky that I can work from home the rest of the week. It’s a gift and one that I know could go away at any moment. And it’s probably the only thing that is allowing me to keep doing my job. I don’t think my body could take it if that changes. So I also don’t want to push things because I’m afraid that rocking the boat could just make things worse.

I’m still pretty early in my journey with this particular condition (and with recognizing I have disabilities at all though I’ve had migraines for 24 years) and I guess I’m going to have to learn to have thicker skin and stronger boundaries if I want to stay well. I really love the work I do, I love students, and I don’t want to disappoint anyone, but I need to keep reminding myself that there are many ways to contribute and that a huge percentage (41%) of our students don’t come to campus and also deserve outreach and support. I can still do valuable work and be a valuable part of our team and still take care of myself. I just need to stop caring how others see me when I refuse to do certain things or when I’m the only person (gulp) online in an in-person meeting, which is hard for a life-long people-pleaser. While I’d love it if people tried to make these spaces more accessible, all I can control in this situation is my own choices and I need to stop worrying about whether people think I’m not committed or am not a team player (and I’m not suggesting everyone thinks that; I have no idea). My work over the previous ten years should speak for itself. And if people really wanted me around at any of these events, they could show it by masking to keep me (and others, and also themselves) safe.

I’ve been doing so much thinking, reading, and writing on social media about COVID that I was honestly surprised to find that I hadn’t written much about it on this blog beyond talking a little about my experience with disability due to COVID (tl:dr – In 2022, I not only ended up with Long COVID, a few symptoms of which are still with me more than two years later, but also developed an incurable, painful, and life-changing autoimmune connective tissue disease). I’m one of millions of people for whom a single COVID infection radically altered their lives and I’m much luckier than most that I can still work. We know that further infections increase the likelihood of post-COVID sequelae or the worsening of existing symptoms (not to mention a grab-bag of organ damage and death). So those of us who have already been damaged by COVID know that avoiding getting it again is priority one. I still mask at work. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve eaten in an indoor restaurant and it’s only at like 3 or 4pm when wastewater counts are extremely low. The only concerts I go to are my son’s band concerts and I take all the precautions I can. At work, I avoid most in-person gatherings. I have to teach classes and work at the reference desk, but if there’s a virtual option for a meeting, I’ll take it (even though hybrid meetings are terrible for those participating virtually), and if an in-person event is optional, I usually skip it. I know I’m missing out on a lot and I may not look like a team player when I don’t volunteer to sit in a crowded room full of students during Welcome Week, but I know this is what I have to do to protect the already diminished level of functioning I currently have.

While people definitely masked in Portland far longer than elsewhere, it’s become quite common for me to be the only person wearing a mask. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by that, but I am. After all, I work with highly-educated faculty who keep up with what’s happening in the world. Surely I can’t be the only person who understands how potentially ruinous to one’s health a COVID infection could be. I also work with people deeply committed to social justice and inclusion and am surprised to see so little solidarity or concerns about accessibility for those more vulnerable (more on that in my next post).

The people I work with are the sort who did all the right things when COVID hit. They didn’t go to restaurants and sat outside to socialize. They didn’t fight mask bans, they got vaccinated as soon as they could, and masked longer than most. Many even criticized people who weren’t taking the precautions they were. But something changed in the past two years where I don’t even feel like I can talk about COVID or COVID mitigation anymore without sounding like a crazy person. And ironically, in that time, the research on the short-and-long-term impacts of COVID on perfectly healthy people has become even more clear and even more bleak. So that begs the question, why did all these smart, caring, worldly people stop taking precautions? 

For the folks I know, I wonder if part of the reason why they stopped masking is because nearly all of them got COVID between 2022 and 2024 and had pretty mild cases. Some even worked (remotely) through it. The only people I know who still mask at work had Long COVID symptoms. Before I got COVID in 2022, one colleague explicitly told me not to worry because it was just like a cold. But the research shows that the more times you get COVID, the more likely you are to have sequelae, so getting lucky the first time doesn’t mean you won’t get absolutely wrecked the second. In light of the research, believing it won’t happen to you is nothing less than hubris.

I don’t think information literacy is the issue here. Most people I know are quite smart, well-read, and adept at research. I don’t know if they read things about COVID anymore, but if they’re not, it’s not because they don’t know how to find it. I think a lot more is happening with people who avoid COVID information and ignore risks and I think it’s a mix of personal psychological factors, privilege, the absolute disaster that was public health messaging around COVID, and social pressure to align with the dominant narrative that COVID is over. I know we like to distill things down to a single cause (“they’re selfish!” “It’s Biden’s fault!”), but this is considerably more complicated.

Many of us are dealing with pandemic fatigue, which is a lot like burnout and leads to a “demotivation to engage in protection behaviors and seek COVID-19 related information” (Haktanir, et al., 2022, p. 7315). Ford, Douglas, & Barrett (2023) describe pandemic fatigue as “a complex set of emotions comprised of anxiety, hopelessness, depression, and anger.” There are a few of reasons people become fatigued in this way. The biggest is simply the length of time we were all expected to stay in a state of emergency and hypervigilance. Living in that state with no clear end in sight can easily lead to burnout as many of us who have worked in high stress jobs can attest. You can’t stay in a state of hypervigilance forever without eventually becoming exhausted and desensitized (Koh, Chan, & Tan 2020). Chen et al. (2024) found that even when they controlled for pandemic severity at particular points in time, pandemic fatigue increased in study participants an average of 5.8% every six months of the pandemic. Instead of vilifying folks who experience pandemic fatigue and decrease their precautions, the WHO portrays it as “a natural and expected reaction to sustained and unresolved adversity in people’s lives,” (7), an approach which I personally appreciate. Shame is not a motivator and these are very normal psychological responses.

There’s also the frog in the pot metaphor, which can explain some of this behavior. Over time, things that once seemed extreme become normalized without us really noticing. I’ve written about how sneakily overwork became the norm, the base expectation, in many workplaces because, over time, the “exceptional present” (Meyers, et al. 2021), became the everyday. The phenomenon is called shifting baselines. Many people simply got used to living in a pandemic, just like plenty of people don’t seem horrified anymore by the genocide and mass killing of children that has been happening in Gaza for over a year and which would have been unthinkable before. Even as more information about the long-term consequences of COVID came out and people learned that even a minor case could lead to permanent vital organ damage or a heart attack, it was just a small ratcheting up of the temperature to them and didn’t change their risk calculus. As Haktanir, et al. (2022) put it:

For instance, as time passes, individuals may become used to coronavirus’s existence; therefore, the most extreme circumstances may become normal, and the perceived threat of the COVID-19 pandemic may decrease. (7315)

As people become accustomed to even horrific situations, they become more numb to it. 

In their study of people who admitted to greater risk behavior than earlier in the pandemic, Haktanir, et al. (2022) found that “intolerance of uncertainty” plays a major role in pandemic fatigue (7320). Surprisingly, the other elements they discovered led to pandemic fatigue were fear of COVID, apathy, and a lack of self-care. The people they found taking risks were not less afraid of COVID; they just were less tolerant of ambiguity and less committed to taking care of themselves. And the people in this study were taking greater risks at a time when, in 2021, COVID deaths were skyrocketing to their highest levels ever, so their decision had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual risk they faced.

Two studies (Sulemana et al., 2023; Taylor, Rachor, & Asmundson 2022) found that economic privilege impacted whether or not people continued precautionary behavior. People who were more well-off economically were less likely to wear masks or take other precautions, which matches what I see in my own life. While few people wear masks at my community college, I’m rarely the only person I see in a day wearing one. At any event at my son’s school (which is in a wealthier suburb), my husband and I are always the only people masking. At my local grocery store, the only other people I see masking are people who work there. Of course, it’s easier to ignore the risks when you know you are financially able to access quality medical care and can afford to be sick and out of work. In addition, Taylor, Rachor, & Asmundson’s study found that those who were not taking precautions tended to be more “narcissistic, entitled, and gregarious, and were more likely to report having been infected with SARSCOV2, which they regarded as an exaggerated threat” (11). So in addition to privilege, perhaps there’s an element of selfishness and, as I mentioned earlier, the mistaken assumption that if one’s COVID case was mild the first time it would always be thus. It is quite a privileged position to assume that you are the exception to the rule. Steven Thrasher writes about this in his excellent book The Viral Underclass and rightly connects it to whiteness:

As I drove, it occurred to me that much of what had transpired in [Michael Johnson’s] life over the past half decade had flowed from the myth of white immunity: the misconception that white people are totally exempt from health risks, particularly viral risk. This myth tricks white people not only into making themselves needlessly susceptible to viruses, but also into refusing to see how at risk they are from all the harms and violence of society, which can grind one into the viral underclass. (page 231)

It’s this myth of white immunity and its inherent ableism that leads to the lack of solidarity we’ve seen around COVID risk, which will be the focus of my next essay.

People also experience message fatigue, which is a consequence of information overload and repetitive messaging. Like pandemic fatigue, message fatigue makes people tune out and stop adhering to safety precautions. And there are a lot of things about messaging that can lead to message fatigue, like the use of jargon (Shulman, Bullock, & Riggs, 2021), repetitive information (in 2020, Koh, Chan & Tan described a study found that each additional text message from health officials to healthcare workers led to a >40% decrease in recall of the message – yikes!), inconsistent or contradictory messaging (you know, like telling people masks don’t work and then later having mask mandates) (Taylor 2022), trust or lack thereof in public health officials (Seo et al., 2021), and “prolonged message exposure” (Ball & Wozniak, 2021). Two studies I read (Mohammed, et al., 2021; Wiedicke, Stehr, & Rossmann, 2023) found message fatigue stronger in people who watched broadcast media vs. online news and social media where there is more agency in what one is consuming. Message fatigue has been shown to lead people to simply tune out of these messages and also to exhibit reactance, which is like a rebellion against information one feels is suppressing their freedom, like refusing to mask. In addition, Hwang, So, & Jeong (2023) found that message fatigue was a strong predictor of people’s willingness to accept COVID misinformation.

There is a whole sub-field of risk communication that has explored the issue of how and why people choose to seek out or ignore information about risks. According to Ford, Douglas, & Barrett (2023):

In their seminal work theorizing the relationship between risk information-seeking and risk preventative behaviors, Griffin et al. (1999) identify seven characteristics that prompt individuals to seek and process health information in divergent ways: (1) individual characteristics, (2) perceived hazard characteristics, (3) affective risk response, (4) felt social pressures to possess relevant information, (5) information sufficiency, (6) personal capacity to learn, and (7) beliefs about the usefulness of information in various channels. Each of these characteristics sway how likely an individual is to seek out risk information and the extent to which that individual dedicates time and energy to critically evaluating risk information. (p. 2)

In their study, they found that while some people who had pandemic fatigue avoided information about COVID risks, it led other people to seek out that information, so there’s obviously more going on psychologically than just fatigue that predicts whether or not people will ignore risk information. They also write about how some people avoid risk information that scares them and others avoid risk information if they feel like it somehow doesn’t apply to them (3). It’s a complex interplay of psychological and external factors.

There hasn’t been much from the library field that has really reckoned with these issues, but I did find a fantastic article from Lloyd and Hicks (2022) that looked at safeguarding practices people employ to avoid message fatigue (or what they call “saturation”). Lloyd and Hicks  see creating boundaries around taking in more information an adaptive feature of information literacy:

Avoiding information creates the conditions and space to reduce the noise that is created by the pandemic’s accelerated information environments. The space created enabled participants to contextualise and reflect upon the narratives of the new norm and reconcile new information with current knowledge. (11-12)

At a time when information overload and misinformation are ever-present risks, making space to contextualize sounds like a positive step, and perhaps that is what some of the people with message fatigue are doing. However, even Lloyd and Hicks recognize that this safeguarding strategy could limit one’s ability to remain informed about the risks of the pandemic (14). It is worth considering though that there might be benefits to limiting what information one is taking in.

I think for some people trauma might also play a role in their choice to ignore the risks of COVID. For those of us who got to work from home in our sweatpants early in the pandemic, we avoided a lot of the extreme trauma that came in that first year. I can only imagine how deeply painful and stressful it was to be a nurse or doctor in New York City in the Spring and Summer of 2020. I also think a lot of people were traumatized by the isolation and loneliness they experienced early on. I recognize how lucky I was to be at home with my partner and child and also to not be an extravert. I can’t imagine that the memories of these experiences don’t impact some people’s willingness to mask or to take other precautions.

And of course peer-pressure is another factor that keeps people from masking, but honestly, it feels like a pretty pathetic excuse for an adult to have unless you live in a place where masking could put your safety at risk. I’ve felt the discomfort of being the only one wearing a mask in tons and tons of situations (including in deep red Eastern Oregon which hates us Western OR folks so much they want to become part of Idaho) and have gotten looks, but if that was enough to keep me from wearing one, it would be pretty stupid of me to put appearances and fitting in over my health. I’m not dying for the social approval of others.

I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how much inconsistent and contradictory public health messaging as well as the politicization of COVID shaped people’s perceptions of the virus and their risk. When public health officials lied to our faces about the efficacy of masks, even if it was in an effort to ensure hospital workers had access to quality masks, they not only created a persistent narrative, but damaged public trust. The World Health Organization (2020), which shared that same misinformation about masking, shared the following best practices for public health messaging:

Be as consistent as possible in messages and actions, and avoid conflicting measures

Be transparent by sharing reasons behind restrictions and any changes made to them, and by acknowledging the limits of science and government. 

Strive for predictability in unpredictable circumstances, for example, by using objective criteria for restrictions and any changes made to them. 

Tailor communication to specific groups that experience demotivation. Test messages and visuals with sample populations before launching them (5-6)

There is so much evidence out there that effectively designed public health messaging can significantly impact behavior (Nan, Iles, Yang, & Ma, 2022), but much of the messaging we saw from public health officials and politicians adhered to none of the best practices the WHO listed. And while Trump was responsible for a lot of the early misinformation, it was Biden who totally lost control of the narrative. In late-Spring 2021, around the time most Americans were getting their COVID-19 vaccines, Biden gave a speech like Bill Pullman in Independence Day declaring that we were about to defeat COVID: “After this long hard year, that will make this Independence Day something truly special, where we not only mark our independence as a nation, but we begin to mark our independence from this virus.” At that time, 89% of people believed that COVID was almost over (McCoy, 2023). Most of you will probably remember that the Delta wave hit that summer and by August, only 15% of people felt the situation with COVID was improving. That Fall, Dr. Fauci said that we could start getting back to normal when we went below 10,000 cases per day nationally, but I don’t think that has ever happened. Biden again declared the pandemic over in 2022 (something he can’t actually do for the whole world). So much for using “objective criteria.” Yet in spite of objective data, by 2022, only 19% of Americans saw COVID as a major issue and only 24% were concerned about contracting COVID (McCoy 2023). Whether people are clinging to early narratives that COVID is just like the flu or a bad cold, bought into Biden’s narrative, think the whole pandemic is a hoax, or simply became fatigued by the uncertainty and inconsistent messaging, it’s clear that horrible public health messaging played a role in why many people stopped taking precautions. And the biggest messages that have come out of the pandemic is that 1) the economy is far more important than human lives and 2) it’s perfectly ok for vulnerable people (“the viral underclass” as Steven Thrasher calls us) to die to keep the economy going.

By the Fall of 2023, I’d let down my guard a bit. I still masked at work and in most indoor spaces, but I’d sometimes not wear a mask when running a quick errand and I wasn’t checking COVID metrics anymore. I decided that after four years of not going to any concerts or big events, I was going to take my son to see the Nutcracker. It had been our annual tradition before COVID and I figured that at 14, this was the last possible year he’d consider going with me. I’d seen so many friends go to countless events unmasked and they never got sick. So we went, masked of course. But I didn’t consider the impact Long COVID, my autoimmune disease, and the meds I take for it might have had on my immune system. Three days later, on Christmas Day, I tested positive for COVID. My son who’d sat next to me was fine. I was terrified that I was going to get even sicker. But while my body couldn’t clear the virus for a month, the illness on the whole was milder, perhaps thanks, in part, to my immune system not putting up a fight.

Though I don’t seem to have gotten worse from this second infection, I won’t know for sure and  I lost an entire winter break where I could have spent quality time with my son who only has a few years left at home. And it could all have been so much worse. I know I see COVID through the lens of my own traumatic experiences. I won’t pretend that those of us who are COVID conscious are 100% rational and those of you not masking are 100% irrational. But I do think that when a dangerous, disabling, and deadly virus is surging in one’s community (which it was just a couple of months ago) and it’s spread by aerosolized particles from our breath and waste, it seems pretty rational to try and protect yourself. Taking precautions hasn’t kept me from living a good and full life and having fantastic travel experiences. But I don’t live exactly like I did before COVID because I’m living proof of the damage it can do. The pain, fatigue, and myriad other debilitating and disturbing symptoms that have been a daily part of my life since COVID (not to mention the dangerous drugs I have to take to function and the medical bills that have piled up) are potent reminders that a single infection can be life-altering, so altering one’s life in small ways to prevent it seems pretty reasonable.

ALL of what has happened has left us unmoored and struggling to make sense of the reality in which we’re living (or some of us have settled into extreme views that give us the comfort of certainty). In the great viral (pun intended) article entitled “How COVID broke reality,” Nate Bear writes “covid has broken everyone’s brain. Not because of viral host manipulation, or even bad information per se, but because so many people, wherever they place themselves on the political spectrum, lack an analytical framework through which to feed the last four years.” I highly recommend reading that along with Marianne Cooper and Maxim Voronov’s Scientific American piece “We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away from Reality.” They share tactics that have led to collective denial about the dangers of COVID and use the frog in boiling water analogy to argue that “we think we no longer have a problem [with COVID], when we’ve just changed the standard by which we deem something concerning.” They also describe how “truth-tellers” who have not stuck to whatever dominant narrative exists in society have been marginalized, pathologized, and punished. So strong is the desire to return to “normal” that it’s much easier to believe that people still wearing masks have a psychological problem than to question whether maybe you should be wearing one too in some situations. 

Cooper and Voronov suggest that “when we mentally and emotionally recalibrate to the new normal, we also disassociate from our own humanity.” In my next post, I’ll be writing about ableism and solidarity and what a deeply disappointing experience it has been to see folks who claim to be strongly committed to social justice abandon people with disabilities and those particularly vulnerable to COVID. Something I saw people saying over and over across social media after the election was if you care about social justice, you’ll put on a mask. It’s an extremely easy, visible, and truly impactful way to show your solidarity with folks with disabilities – who in fascist regimes are often the first victims — and, frankly, with everyone around you. But I’m not seeing more people masking around here.

While I know the reason people don’t mask has nothing to do with information literacy and not having access to good information, I’m going to share a bit of information about COVID below in the hopes that if my post has made at least one person think about how they think about COVID, they will have easy access to that info in a single place:

• Here are several deeply concerning articles on how COVID damages the brain. Did you lose your sense of smell when you had COVID? Did you know that was actual brain damage? Having dealt with brain fog since I first got COVID, I don’t want to lose any more brain function than I already have. Already, I find myself constantly grasping for the right word, especially when I’m teaching, which makes me look addled. As knowledge workers, what are we without our ability to think clearly?
• And the brain isn’t the only organ COVID can harm (remember when we just thought of it as something that could damage the lungs? How naive we were!). The recent news that a single COVID infection can increase your risk of stroke or heart attack for three years after your infection is alarming. Here’s another article on the impact of COVID on cardiac health from the New York Times (gift link). COVID can also damage your digestive system, increases your risk of contracting diabetes, and may be responsible for an increase in cancer risk because it damages our immune system. From this excellent rundown of current research from the Pandemic Accountability Index, it’s clear that COVID can impact most organs of the body, even in previously healthy individuals.
• Also, your risk of disabling Long COVID may be higher than you think: Here is an article that looked at a cohort of healthy young (median age 18) Marines and found that 25% of them were dealing with long-COVID symptoms. A study of over 20,000 healthcare and social service workers in Quebec found that 13% had contracted Long COVID after a first infection, 23% after a second infection, and 37% after a third infection. A Health Canada study of a more general population of Canadians found strikingly similar rates by number of infections. Yikes.
• And remember how COVID wasn’t supposed to harm kids? Ooops! See “COVID is harming too many kids,” “Long COVID Rates in Kids Revised Upward: What to Know”, and the JAMA article “Characterizing Long COVID in Children and Adolescents.”

These risks aren’t theoretical, they aren’t rare, they aren’t only happening to people who are already unhealthy or disabled. Every time you get COVID you are playing a game of Russian Roulette. You might be lucky and end up unscathed or you could end up with disabling, painful, or terminal illnesses as a result. Maybe you are ok with that or maybe you don’t think it could happen to you (I had no risk factors before I got sick and only became part of “the viral underclass” as a result of having COVID), but there are simple precautions you can take to protect yourself and people you care about. No matter how long it has been since you put on a mask, it’s never too late to reconsider. It’s never too late to rethink.

Works Cited

Ball, H., & Wozniak, T. R. (2021). Why do some Americans resist COVID-19 prevention behavior? An analysis of issue importance, message fatigue, and reactance regarding COVID-19 messaging. Health Communication, 37(14), 1812-1819. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2021.1920717 

Bear, Nate. “How COVID broke reality,” ¡Do Not Panic!

Chen, R., Tan, Q., Su, B., Wang, S., & Du, Z. (2024). A Systematic Review of the Definition, Measurement, and Associated Factors of Pandemic Fatigue. China CDC weekly, 6(36), 924–933. https://doi.org/10.46234/ccdcw2024.068

Cooper, M., & Voronov, M. (2024). “We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away from Reality.” Scientific American, 331(3), 55–56.

Ford, J. L., Douglas, M., & Barrett, A. K. (2023). The role of pandemic fatigue in seeking and avoiding information on COVID-19 among young adults. Health Communication, 38(11), 2336-2349.

Haktanir, A., Can, N., Seki, T., Kurnaz, M. F., & Dilmaç, B. (2022). Do we experience pandemic fatigue? current state, predictors, and prevention. Current Psychology, 41(10), 7314-7325.

Hwang, Y., So, J., & Jeong, S.-H. (2023). Does COVID-19 Message Fatigue Lead to Misinformation Acceptance? An Extension of the Risk Information Seeking and Processing Model. Health Communication, 38(12), 2742–2749. https://doi-org.libproxy.pcc.edu/10.1080/10410236.2022.2111636 

Koh, P. K., Chan, L. L., & Tan, E. K. (2020). Messaging Fatigue and Desensitisation to Information During Pandemic. Archives of medical research, 51(7), 716–717. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arcmed.2020.06.014

Lloyd, A., & Hicks, A. (2022). Saturation, acceleration and information pathologies: the conditions that influence the emergence of information literacy safeguarding practice in COVID-19-environments. Journal of Documentation, 78(5), 1008-1026.

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When I started this blog, I had been married for three months and was about a month away from graduating from library school. I was really passionate about the profession and was driving my husband nuts talking about library stuff all the time, so a blog seemed like a good space to share my ideas, keep current, and do what I love, which is writing. And I’m so grateful to have had this space to work out my often jumbled thoughts ever since. Since then, I got what really was a dream job after a long and soul-killing job hunt. Then, in the span of what felt like both the longest and shortest five years ever, I got a book deal and wrote Social Software in Libraries (2006-7), got an American Libraries column (2007), started teaching for San Jose State (2008), started traveling around the world giving talks (2007-2012), and had a baby (2009). I look back on those years and it feels both like a whirlwind and like I was living a particularly charmed life. Yes, I worked my ass off and basically made librarianship my life in an incredibly unsustainable way, but a lot of people do that and don’t have all the things fall in their laps that did for me. I think a lot of it was being at the right place at the right time (when old media, library associations, and library schools were trying to become more “web 2.0”) and being loudly and unapologetically myself. It was quite the ride and I recognize the good fortune I had to experience it. 

I feel like my next 14 years were years of slow dismantling. I became antsy to climb the career ladder at a job I loved and left for a job at a toxic workplace that made me question my worth as a librarian and as a human being. I was fortunate to find my current job at PCC, which I’ve been at for over a decade now, which was (and still is in many ways) a dream. And, in an environment in which I both had tenure and felt safe, I was able to start separating out what I did because I loved it and what I did because I thought it was necessary to climb a ladder or to feel worthy. In those years, I struggled with work/life balance (especially as a mother and while negotiating the tenure track in my previous job) and experienced a mid-career crisis/burnout. I’ve still published, presented, served on committees, and taught, but far, far less than I used to, and only when it was about things I was passionate about (like building a culture of assessment, accessible online education, privacy, DEI, slow librarianship, embedding library instruction, etc.). I even gave up writing for American Libraries because I felt like I’d had enough (too much?) of the spotlight and wanted to see the publication give other folks a chance. During the pandemic, I finally recognized after 20 years of suffering with debilitating migraines that I had a real disability, advocated for accommodations, and then was promptly further disabled by COVID and an autoimmune disease. Fortunately, all that came at a time when I’d de-centered work and de-coupled it from my sense of worth and was able to properly prioritize my health.

Today, I’m going through old posts and reflecting on what I’m most proud of in my work here. With over 900 posts, I obviously didn’t look at everything. I focused on posts I remember loving and those that got a lot of comments (would you believe my blog used to regularly get 20-75 comments on a single post???). Believe me, there were plenty of posts that made me cringe (oversharing, being a self-righteous jerk, being suffused with vocational awe, etc.), plenty that made me want to give my former self a hug or tell her “you don’t need to keep proving yourself!”, but I still see a lot to feel proud of, even from my early years in the field.  

I’m proud of the critical and questioning stance I’ve had since the beginning. I feel like while people were jumping on bandwagons around things like Library 2.0, adopting free Web 2.0 technologies for critical library services, and rebranding information literacy as transliteracy, I was critically evaluating those things, even when doing so didn’t make me a popular person. I’m also proud of standing up against oppressive practices in libraries, like devaluing library workers who don’t have an MLIS,  hiring for “fit” (which was still a very common practice when I wrote this), neutrality, and open offices among others.

I’m proud of my consistent advocacy for online learners. I had an absolutely crappy experience doing my MLIS degree online and have always wanted to right those wrongs for other students, with my early work as a distance learning librarian, my online teaching at San Jose State, and my advocacy for equal treatment of online students. Unfortunately, it feels like after 20 years, while there is more of a focus on quality in online teaching, library services for online students are still largely treated like an afterthought and it breaks my heart. 

I’m proud of my writing about teaching, which has been the heart of my work for nearly 20 years. Here are just a few that I can still look and not feel embarrassed about:

• “I need three peer reviewed articles” or the freshman research paper (2011)
• The devil you know in first-year instruction (2012)
• Library DIY: Unmediated point-of-need support (2013)
• Peer learning in library instruction (2015)
• The ballad of the sad instruction librarian (2017)

I’m proud of my writing about slow librarianship, starting with this 2019 series (which was before I even called what I was writing about slow librarianship):

• Thoughts at Mid-Career Part 1 – Letting Go, Questioning, and Pathfinding
• Thoughts at Mid-Career Part 2 – Ambition: You are Not Enough
• Thoughts at Mid-Career Part 3 – Our Achievement Culture: What You’re Doing Will Never Be Enough
• Thoughts at Mid-Career Part 4 – The Cult of Productivity: You’re Never Doing Enough
• Thoughts at Mid-Career Part 5: Where to From Here?

Here are the other posts I’m particularly proud of that are about (or are closely related to) slow librarianship. If you’re interested in learning more about slow librarianship, these are good posts to look at:

• Slow life, slow librarianship (2021)
• What is slow librarianship? (2021)
• Stop normalizing overwork (2022)
• Valuing maintenance (2022)
• Vocational awe is always harmful (2023)
• With work time at the center (2024)
• The productivity trap (2024)
• Queer Time, Crip Time, and Subverting Temporal Norms (2024)
• Community Time and Enoughness: The heart of slow librarianship (2024)

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be writing this blog. I certainly didn’t expect to be writing this 20 years in and I’ll be retired in another 20 years and will be happy to fully disengage from librarianship when I do. I guess I can promise that as long as I have something to say, something I feel passionately about, I’ll probably write about it here. And I vow never to write things just to fill the space or because I’m scared of losing readers; everything I write will be suffused with the same care I have put into my recent posts.

This blogaversary also coincides with the deactivation of my X/Twitter account, which I plan to do this week. I’ve been on there since April 2007 and it’s also a huge chronicle of my adult life. I downloaded an archive of my feed and I read things about my son’s early years that I had totally forgotten about.  I’ve always had mixed feelings about Twitter, but I stayed for far longer than I thought I ever would. You can find me on Bluesky now as librarianmer. And if you’re a newsletter fan, know that you can also subscribe to get this blog in your Inbox.

I grew up in a house where there wasn’t a lot of joy or positive recognition, so in response, I’ve always been a big over-celebrator of everything. I will look for any excuse to celebrate someone or something and to show my gratitude. And frankly, isn’t that how it should be? As I’ve said before, gratitude is an endlessly renewable resource. So I’ll be eating cake with my family to celebrate the only thing I’ve stuck with for 20 years other than my marriage. And I hope you can find things in your own life to celebrate. Your exercise streak. A project you just finished. Your tenure at a job or on a committee. Something you built or made as a hobby. Finishing that really hard video game. Making it through the week. Seriously. Everyone deserves a celebration! And if you can’t think of anything to celebrate, just know that I’m grateful for you, reader. You who take the time to read my words, even sometimes when my posts are way too long. Even when you don’t make yourself known to me through comments or by sharing on social media, I’m grateful that you’re here. 

When I started writing my book Social Software in Libraries, it was 2005 and the Internet was a very different place. YouTube was brand-new. Facebook was only open to folks with a .edu email address. Twitter came out just as I was finishing my book draft and no one I knew was using it yet. There was no FriendFeed, Vine, Instagram, TikTok, Tumblr, or Snapchat (and some of these don’t even exist today). Most people participating in social media had their own blogs and it was a really optimistic time to be in social media. It felt like a democratized space where anyone with something to say could find an audience (I say felt because, in hindsight, it was a fairly homogeneous space where certain kinds of people could find an audience). The possibilities for building collaboration and community with our patrons online seemed limitless. While there were certainly jerks and arguments online, we didn’t see abusive bots or mobbing happening the way it does now on sites like X/Twitter. I couldn’t have imagined that bad actors would one day use it to influence elections and that it would become a bot and misinformation-infested nightmare.

In 2008, I started regularly teaching a class on social media for San Jose State University and obviously I had the students actively using social media. They blogged in public throughout the course — their blogs basically were our “discussion board” and they created accounts and posted to Twitter for a week. I’m sure I had them sign up for many other things too. I didn’t worry about them being exposed to abusive content because that wasn’t prevalent back then. I let them know that their blogs would be public and that they didn’t have to use their name or any identifying information on it, but I didn’t give them another option if they didn’t want to have a public blog (something I regret in hindsight). And, from looking back to the blog post I wrote after my first semester teaching the course, it seems like the students really appreciated the format and found themselves more connected to their classmates than in something like Blackboard. But, after teaching for a few years, I kept the class blogging, but made the blogs only accessible to the students in the class. Eventually, I started teaching a class on embedding information literacy and library services into courses instead and I kept class blogging, but students didn’t need to do any posting to public social media. And as things like Gamergate happened and social media became a more abusive and negative place, I felt increasingly good about moving away from using public social media in classes.

So, when I was asked to review a new book entitled Information Literacy and Social Media: Empowered Student Engagement with the ACRL Framework, I agreed with a bit of trepidation. While I am a big believer in making my teaching relevant to students’ real lives, I’d become pretty cynical when it comes to using social media in classes. Even if they already use it, I don’t really want to encourage students to use something that has such a negative impact on young people. And it’s clear that authors Michele Santamaría and Nicole Pfannenstiel anticipated that reticence from readers, because they acknowledge the issues and make quite a strong case for its use. They recognize that social media addiction is a problem and that social media can be abusive, especially for people with marginalized identities. Pfannenstiel even discusses how her students on Twitter/X were discovered and then marketed to by paper mill bots. The authors argue that these are not reasons to avoid using social media in teaching, but discuss how these become valuable teachable moments that can make students better critical information consumers and creators. The bots provided an opportunity to discuss the motivations (commercial, political, etc.) behind bots and other bad actors online and how using specific words in posts can attract unwanted attention. Like my experience with blogging, they talk about how sterile forums in the LMS are, how little real engagement there is in those spaces, and how the use of Twitter/X in their teaching has led to longer-lasting connections. They describe how the use of social media “help[s] students interrogate how they use the internet and… help[s] students see their work, even interactions as simple as clicking a like button, as creation within internet spaces.” After reading this disturbing story in the NY Times last year, the idea of having students become more mindful of the potential impact of even minor actions (like liking a friend’s post) on social media seems like a good one.

The book is a quick read whose first third is focused on justifying the use of social media, surveying the literature, and sparking the reader’s own reflection about social media use. I appreciated their strong advocacy for focusing on students’ roles as information creators, something that often gets lost in information literacy instruction, and how they distinguished that from the more capitalistic term “producers” that was originally used by notable advocates of metaliteracy. The rest of the book is full of practical takeaways for those looking for actual ways to incorporate social media into their classroom teaching. I really liked the section of the book where the authors went through each frame of the Framework, listed the knowledge practices and dispositions relevant to social media use, and described concrete social media examples that relate to that practice or disposition. I envisioned many ways that I could use those examples in classes. They then go on to provide concrete and detailed activities that utilize social media to teach things like the importance of keywords and how to use them to discover specific conversations, how authority is constructed by influencers in the context of social media and how that relates to how authority is constructed in any space, or creating a conversation on social media around a specific reading using a hashtag. I would have liked to see more of those. What I appreciated was that some of the activities didn’t require students to actively post to social media or to create accounts on something they don’t use (those were my main objections to using social media in information literacy instruction). In some, students played the role of an observer to discover existing conversations or influencers in social media and then they created their own conversations about what they learned in their classroom groups rather than on a social media site. I could definitely get behind using social media in that way in the classroom.

I agree with Santamaría and Pfannenstiel that when we keep our teaching to the “walled garden of peer-reviewed scholarship” we do our students a grave disservice, but I don’t think social media is the only other place. In my classes, we explore searching on the free web and look at popular media too. I tend to treat all information the same way — it all deserves scrutiny/evaluation. Look into the author. Look into the publication/website/organization. What about them would make you trust them? What give you pause? What might it be “good” for in the context of your information need (since even a social media post can be a good source in specific use cases)? So I guess, to some extent, then, I do use social media in my teaching.

For those of you who work with traditional-aged college students, I imagine it would be a lot easier to get your students using a specific social media tool in the classroom. I could imagine when you’re working with 18-22 year olds, they probably all have Instagram and TikTok accounts. When my class populations frequently range from 18 (or less!)-60+ and students vary widely in terms of comfort level with technology, it’s a harder sell. If you have interest in using social media to engage your students around information literacy learning in the spaces they frequent online and to help them be more mindful about their social media use, this slim volume will give you inspiration and concrete ideas for doing so.