Writing as an Act of Vulnerability

Short post today because my thoughts on this topic are still evolving.

Let's be honest with each other: writing and publishing something is an act of vulnerability. You're putting yourself out there and, in a manner of speaking, showing your soft underbelly. I think about this every time I find a typo in a post I've already published, and then chastise myself for not editing more closely. I think about this every time someone takes issue with a point I've made and I try to figure out if I could have been clearer. And I think about it every time a post or tweet or whatever resonates strongly with people and I get retweeted/shared a lot. Yes, vulnerability can be scary, but it can also be a very good thing. I know for sure that we need to be more vulnerable.

Sharing the less than pretty thoughts and emotions and outcomes is hard. There is still so much stigma around mental illness and anger and failure that we are all at least a little afraid we'll be judged. But the truth is we all experience these things.

• I don't know many librarians - or people, for that matter - who aren't suffering with some kind of anxiety or depression or other mental illness. Heck, in a talk I gave last year about how to get up to speed when you're a new library administrator, in a section where I was discussing self care, I said, "find yourself a good therapist." The audience was predominately people who were new library administrators, and more than half of the people in the room nodded their heads in agreement. 
• Everyone gets angry sometimes (well, maybe not the Dalai Lama, but he's a special case). The thing about anger is that the only people who are allowed to express it without being judged are cishet WASP men, and even they are judged if they get angry too often. A friend of mine recently marveled at the fact that I, as a library administrator, was expressing anger about something that happened at work. I don't remember exactly how my friend said it, but it was along the lines of, "most library administrators are so zen." My response was something like, "no library administrators are zen, we've just gotten good at playing our cards close to our chest."
• And everyone fails sometimes. We share our triumphs, which is good, but sharing our failures is actually more important - especially for those of us who are more established in our fields and in our lives. I've messed up my budget before. When I was a new administrator, I corrected someone publicly. I've even been fired before. Sometimes failure can be made pretty and palatable, as in "we tried this and it didn't work so we're going to try that instead." Sometimes it can't. It is critical to try to learn from mistakes, but sometimes you just fuck up and have to move on.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I'm going to try to be more vulnerable in my writing here in the future. I encourage you to do the same in your writing. I've got 15+ years in this field and 46+ years on this planet, and if y'all can learn from my mistakes and avoid those pitfalls, it would be great. Not that you aren't going to make any of your own mistakes - but when you do, please know I'd be happy to publish your musings on it so I can help you become comfortable with being vulnerable as well.

Happy New Year, y'all.

“Fail Better” -- But How, Exactly?, by Laura Braunstein

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

                                          -- Samuel Beckett, “Worstward Ho” (1983)

“Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

                                          -- Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

I’m learning something new this year. (Never mind what it is.) I’ve been struck by how this process has an emotional dimension that throws me right back to my early 20s, when so much in my adult life was new, professionally and personally. Now that I’m apparently middle aged, I thought that I wouldn’t get discouraged anymore, or so quickly fall into self-doubt. But I was wrong: every frustration brings back the same emotional experience of those earlier frustrations, half my life ago.

And yet -- I am finding it easier to move past the setbacks, and more satisfying to persist. What’s the difference between then and now? I believe it’s because I now know a few ways to get through it, to have the discipline to work at the constant slog of improving, to keep going. I’m better at what Beckett called “failing better.” And I finally believe that failure – both the small, incremental failures along the way and the potential failure of a great investment of time, focus, and energy -- is not a referendum on my worth as a human being.

This may be sacrilege for someone of my generation to say, but I think Yoda was wrong. Sure, in a literal sense there is only doing, or not doing; but sometimes trying and doing badly – very badly -- is a way of getting better at simply doing.

Maybe you have already heard that. [Editor’s Note: I have quoted Jake the Dog on this website.] What you might be missing are the actual concrete strategies to help you keep doing badly in the face of warnings, explanations, the damnation of faint praise, and other discouragements. How, exactly, does one “fail better”? Here are a few suggestions:

• Commit to failing for a given amount of time, or a given amount of tries. For instance, spend 10-15 minutes, every day, failing. Have no goals other than spending that time. The objective is not, “I’m going to knit a sweater by the end of the month” but “Every day I’m going to spend 15 minutes with this yarn and these needles, and knit some crap.” If you’re trying a Couch-to-5K, understand that the program is predicated on your failing, for weeks, to actually run a 5K. You may be miserable at times, and you’ll just want to quit. Don’t.
• Save or record your failures. Write down how many minutes you spend each day squawking on the clarinet or writing crappy code. Have a folder called “Shitty First Drafts” and put a shitty first draft in it every day. Even if you never ever look at them again, your early failures may contain ideas to expand upon once you feel more confident. Documentation of the specific places or processes where you tend to screw up or get frustrated is also valuable information.
• Ask for help from mentors, but be very realistic about your expectations of their time and energy, particularly if they are volunteering (as opposed to someone from whom you are taking paid lessons). Getting a quick email that says, “This works, do more of it; this doesn’t work, try something different” is valid and useful feedback, and more likely to foster your eventual independence. Beware of mentors who seem to have ulterior motives, or who seem to be overly invested in your success -- or, sad to say, who interpret your request for help as having ulterior motives. (A whole ‘nother guest column could be written about effective ways to be a mentee.)
• Share the fact that you are trying, even if you don’t share your failures. Make sure -- and this may be counterintuitive advice -- to share with people who are not experts in the thing you are trying to do, but rather are experts in supporting you. Ask your partner, not a published poet, to read your first few pathetic poems. Eventually you’ll want an expert opinion, but the point of sharing early failures is not to get feedback but to get the support to keep trying in the face of the drudgery of failure. These are the people in your life to whom you can say, merely, “I did this and I failed” and they will say “yay, go fail at it again.”
• Or, don’t share. Fail privately if that’s what works best for you. There’s no reason that you have to broadcast your attempts. Failure does not have to be a social process, or be out there on every social media account. It is okay to take some time alone and apart to work on something that only you know about. Failure can be very humbling and it can demand a lot of humility. You may feel more comfortable keeping those feelings to yourself.
• Find something to inspire you to keep failing -- a song, a quotation, a book, or an activity like running or meditating or wandering in the woods or singing loudly and off-key while alone in your car. Every time I know I’m going to fail at something new, I play a song that was recorded the month that I was born: “The first days are the hardest days, don’t you worry anymore.”

There is no last word on failure (until, of course, you die -- which in itself is not a failure: think of how long you got to live!), but eventually you’ll feel like you’ve failed enough that one of your efforts might represent something approaching a qualified success. By all means, share it. Let it go out into the world. Be proud of what you’ve accomplished. But remember to honor the failure that got you there, the missteps and the shitty first drafts crumpled in the wastebasket and the stupid ideas that finally led to the ones that might not have succeeded, exactly, but at least failed better than all of the other ones.


Laura Braunstein is the Digital Humanities Librarian at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. She has two children, two cats, one husband, and a hell of a lot of stuff to get done. She would like either Rachel Bloom or Julia Louis-Dreyfus to play her in a movie. Follow her on Twitter at @laurabrarian.

I Was Wrong, But I'm Trying to Learn

This is a thread of things I have been wrong about, or have argued in the past, but would no longer argue. I'm sure it will grow.

— Katherine Crocker (@cricketcrocker) March 6, 2017

The tweet up there is the beginning of a long-ish thread. Each tweet (I highly recommend reading it in its entirety) made me catch my breath. I have been wrong about so many of the same topics. I'm sure there are a lot of us who can identify. I was originally planning to write something about community building for today, but then I saw Crocker's thread and knew I had to write something similar for LtaYL.

So, here are some things about which I have been wrong, oh so very wrong wrongity wrong, with a focus on library-centric ideas.

It's my job to make libraries better for marginalized populations and people of color. Oh, the arrogance in that thought. It makes me cringe just reading it, but I really believed that a few years ago. The idea that I was a knight in shining armor, no matter how well intentioned, still centered my experience and my role in fighting racism in higher ed and in libraries. Further, it ignored the voices of people already in the room. Yes, I do need to fight racism and sexism and transphobia and other prejudices whenever and wherever I can, but one of the most important things I can do as a librarian - and as a library administrator - is to shut my mouth and listen.

If there is nothing in my library's collection that makes my skin crawl, then I'm not doing my job. I can't be a first amendment purist anymore. Sure, the first amendment doesn't strictly apply to the work I do since it discusses government restricting speech, and I've always worked at private institutions. The thing is, I still took it as my job to represent culture in all its various expressions on my shelves. No, we can't ignore the Nazis - either in the past or in our present - but I can no longer blithely buy the kinds of books that represent Holocaust Denier theories as fact. I now know I've given a platform to hate speech, and that bothers me more than I can ever explain. I know this may be a little confusing to read, so let me put it in concrete terms for you: this change in philosophy is why I bought Glenn Beck in the past but refuse to buy Milo Yiannopoulos now.

Diversity initiatives are the answer. This is another complicated mess of an idea, but the core of why it is problematic is that the initiatives are just the beginning. In fact, Harvard Business Review has written about how diversity programs fail. Inclusion and acceptance are not the same thing. By putting all our emphasis on creating diversity, we end up working hard to get people on campus or in the library without considering making people feel welcome and heard and part of the conversation once they arrive. Even more, we need to stop putting the onus on the people around us who are members of one or more minority groups. I was raised Jewish and I'm a practicing Buddhist, and have repeatedly been expected to be the voice of "my people" in professional circumstances, so you'd think with my experiences I'd have grasped this sooner. However, my conditional whiteness (I'm in a minority but I don't read that way at a glance) has made things smoother for me. And one of my favorite definitions of privilege is that the biggest benefit you gain is the ability to be blind to the benefits it affords you.

Back to the thread that got me thinking in this way:

So. Hi. I'm Katherine. I'm superflawed & ashamed of awfulnesses I've done & aware that I will do more before I die.

Join me if you like :)

— Katherine Crocker (@cricketcrocker) March 6, 2017

I'm with you, Katherine. Writing this post was hard, knowing the mistakes I've made in the past and knowing the mistakes I'll make in the future.

Despite frequent accusations that I am really a Time Lord, the truth is I'm human. I'm going to make mistakes. The important thing to remember moving forward is that I need to learn from them.

My Journey So Far, Or 500 Posts and Counting

It's so hard for me to believe that this is the 500th post on this blog. It all started years ago because I got angry, and that fact hasn't really altered, but so much else has changed. Here are some things that I've notice along the way:

1. It's okay to get angry, but I need to do something with my anger. I used to think it was useless to get angry, even in the midst of my ire. I also know part of my reticence to show anger had to do with the inescapable socialization that women are supposed to be nice. It's okay to get angry, but more to the point: it's important to get angry. Being silent can be seen as agreement, so taking a stand is important. I've come to see speaking up as part of my job, both at my place of employment and in the profession in general.
2. There are like minded people everywhere, just not always right next to me. Writing hundreds of posts, tweeting like a maniac, and generally being myself has brought so many amazing people into my life. Of my closest friends, people who I consider not just friends but family, the unmistakable majority of them are people I met through social media and through blogging. When I started this blog, I was definitely working with some great people, but beyond having "library" or "librarian" in our job titles we didn't have a lot in common. All of that changed over the course of this blog.
3. Mistakes are the best learning opportunities. I never set out to waste time or flub a project, but I can tell you I've learned more from my mistakes than anything else. Best of all, I've learned that being open about my mistakes can save other people a lot of headache and heartache. There were times that I ran events where it almost seemed the staff outnumbered the patrons. Then there was that book review blog we tried to start, for and by the alum of a former school. The blog posts that fell flat. The time I unknowingly offended someone I respect and was called out for it. These were valuable experiences. I do what I can to avoid repeating mistakes, but I'm glad I've had the opportunity to learn.
4. Being vulnerable and being human are the best way forward, even though it might not seem that way at the time. There's that great Oscar Wilde quote, "Be yourself, everyone else is already taken." At first it sounds so ridiculously trite that it should be ignored, but I think it sounds like a cliche because it's so very true. I was never milquetoast or bland, but writing this blog has helped me find and strengthen my voice. I've also been able to find my passion within librarianship. 
5. I have to keep listening. I don't know everything. Yes, I've reached this point in my career that all my mouthing off has started to pay off. I get invited to give talks and asked to write things. I'm currently sitting on two invitations to write books (neither of which I have time for right now, but both of which I want to pursue eventually). Despite all this, I am still and forever learning and growing. Everything from minor issues like new technology to major concerns like a learning theory I'd embraced being called into question. I know I wouldn't be able to continue on this path if I hadn't been writing this blog.

Thank you for whatever part of this journey you've seen, and thank you for reading this blog. Here's to 500 more posts.

Spilling the Milk and Other Metaphors for Messing Up, by Marti Fuerst

Photo by Lisa Brewster, used under the CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

At some point in your career, you’re going to screw up. You’re going to drop the ball. At some point, this screwed-up-ball-dropping is going to happen right before you leave for vacation, are sick, or for some other reason are unavailable to immediately fix it.

For instance, say you didn’t record some statistics for a report. It happens. Other things cloud your vision, like answering patron questions, or trying to get one more cart of discards done so you can claim the newly available real estate on the volunteer deprocessing shelves before someone else does, or scrambling to get things ready for the seasonal reading program that starts tomorrow, ordering the patron requests in Overdrive, or even managing your to-do list for the next week you’re back. With all the balls you’re juggling, you forget one. It drops. It doesn’t get done.

You get an email at home from your boss. The boss is, understandably, upset and disappointed with you. You apologize profusely. You too are upset and disappointed with yourself. If you have a small midwestern-town-style upbringing like me, the fact that your boss is upset and disappointed is actually more devastating than the screw-up.

Then you move to the next phase. You try to mitigate some of the guilt. Yes, you should have done the thing. You should not have dropped the ball - but there were procedures that outline how to do the thing so that anyone can do it. They were written so that if the “regular person who does the thing” was unavailable to do the thing, the thing would be done. You still should have done the thing. This mitigation doesn’t really work to ease the guilt weighing on you. Neither does the reply to your email from your boss expressing disbelief that you forgot to do the thing. I know, Boss. I can’t believe I forgot it either.

So where do you go from here?

One screw up isn’t going to land you a bad reference when you move from this library to another one. It hardly outweighs all the awesome things you have done. Yes, it feels like a monumental failure now because it is staring you straight in the face. When you get back to work, you’ll do the thing. The statistics will get recorded within the first hour that you’re back. It will get reported next month. It’s not that big a deal. Yes, you embarrassed yourself, your department, and your boss. The world didn’t end. The doors still opened and people still got access to the materials and services the organization provides. Everyone got a bit of egg on their face, but people are not dry-clean only.

There is a placard I have seen that is intended to be humorous: To err is human - to forgive is not library policy. It is funny in a bun-headed throwback or Conan the Librarian kind of way, but not very conducive to building rapport with patrons or a cooperative, trusting, team-centered workplace. Am I reading too much into a placard? Probably. Should people be held responsible for their mistakes? Of course. My point is not to dwell and stew on it, whether you have to wait a day before you can do anything productive to fix it, or you can fix it as soon as it is discovered. Forgiving yourself won’t go against library policy.

It will be okay.

Depending on the mistake, you can analyze it and make changes to your workflow, habits, etc. to try to ensure it won’t happen again. It’s likely that you will never, ever make this mistake again. That ball, of all the balls you’re juggling, will never touch the ground.

But another one might. In fact, another one probably will.

Marti Fuerst is currently a Librarian at Large as she relocates to Omaha, Nebraska. She is into emerging technologies, board games, zombies, and medieval history. She’s screwed up before, but she dusted herself off, popped a chocolate truffle in her mouth, and soldiered on. She tweets at ZealofZebra, blogs at Biblionalia, and posts library stuff to Google+, and has her portfolio at MartiFuerst.com.