Too much to handle

When asked why I'm leaving, it's hard for me to resist the impulse to rage, vent, and dump on my experience at work. Why am I leaving? Why can't I tolerate things? Why do I get so emotionally involved with things I have no power over? 

I discovered (via Google) I was supposed to be nice in my letter of resignation. I think I'm supposed to stay nice when talking about my place of work (mpow) for a while? indefinitely? Am I going to be allowed to talk all this shit in my exit interview? If I get one?

I feel slightly abnormal now. Why don't I fit in? Why can other people handle the workings of the organization?

I am considering attempting to write a series about my time at work. Yes, I would be processing in a semi-public kind of way. It might be gauche, it might be literally nothing. I consider this a space for my personal and yet professional writing, I have a journal and don't plan to treat this writing the same as I would for a private journal. 

 

What does it mean to be a faculty person who is leaving their tenure track position? What does it mean to be a librarian leaving their field? Lol, I don't really know, I know I can't be the only one, but at this point I don't have other examples to follow. I'm trying to keep this to what professional practices I'm implementing and the career turns I'll go through. In other words, I have a lot of feelings about this change, but I'll keeps those out (maybe). A friend and I discussed creating an ongoing writing practice throughout the summer, I'm looking forward to this and any of my readers will get more regular posts as well. We'll likely focus on various high-level social justice issues and approach each topic from our own perspectives. 

I thought about titling this essay "writing about writing again," perhaps it's unsurprising that when I'm in a writing retreat that I'm feeling a little meta about my own writing. So far, aside from being fairly productive, the main takeaway so far is related to endings. Earlier this week, while attending an online conference (CALM), I learned about the field (practice? theory?) of critical management studies. In the opening retreat discussion, folks were sharing writing practices, habits, tips, rituals, and more. During both of these instances, I'm seeing connections between learning new information and announcing/communicating my departure. My instinct is to jump to frustration, why didn't I know that other faculty struggle with writing? And if I would have known about critical management studies earlier in my career, I think I might have been involved with the larger conversation about this approach. 

I'm not mad or regretting learning these things, it's a little frustrating. But I'm framing this as examples of being a life long learner. No matter what stage of my career or life, I know that I will continue to learn new things and they will shape my perspectives. 

Librarians tend to be liminal folks, maybe especially academic librarians. I don't want to speak for any of the other librarian disciplines, but I have a feeling they could relate too. Our research areas are almost always interdisciplinary and by nature, we're also generalist researchers in pretty much every field. 

I wrote that last paragraph while thinking about how I will be translating my skills to non-academics. And/or even considering roles that are at the edges of higher ed. If the colleagues I work with closely don't even understand why my job is important, then it feels that much harder and more important to do better telling my story to non-academics. And the irony of the infographic that I made above is that directly after finishing it, I experienced a very real interaction with a close colleague that made it clear that my knowledge and expertise as a librarian is not valued. Rather than dwelling on that, I'm going to post this and move on to the next topic.