The important thing is that I kept up my special birthday tradition of gut-wrenching misery.

[hollyslowly]

I think all the other times I thought I was having a quarter life crisis, I was wrong. Or I started having a quarter life crisis at 24, and will continue having one until some as of yet undetermined date. Which is to say, my 28th birthday is Thursday, I will be spending it at a professional conference, and I feel very sad. I might be over-exercising (?) because it is, quite frankly, the only thing that soothes my nutjob anxiety at all, so I'm giving myself a pass on it.

I've had the same job for four years, and while I truly love the fact that I've learned so many different skills and had the opportunity to be successful at the goals set for me, I don't want to do this for the rest of my life. I'm not even sure I want to do this for the rest of the life of my car loan. The problem is that I'm good at lots of things, but I am not passionate about anything. And my birthday is coming up, and I feel like I'm in exactly the same place I was in last year.

I keep thinking, "Well, grad school," but I don't know what discipline I would pursue, which means that would be a pointless waste of time and money. I looked at a job posting for my exact position, but making twice the money in a bigger city, and even though I know I could excel at that position and rake in some $$, the thought of doing the same thing BUT MORE was so disheartening. WHY CAN'T I MAKE A CHOICE ABOUT WHAT I WANT TO DO.

How did you pick your career? Did you feel a calling to do something?

I made mango-banana-Greek yogurt "ice cream," so I have that to look forward to. Man, this is grim.

Comments

[carlyinrome.livejournal.com]

Darling, getting older don't mean SHIT. Also, you're basically an infant, so there's no pressure to Fix Your Life (which is kind of a ridiculous endeavor for you, anyway, because quite frankly you're doing pretty great. Your loans are paid off, you have a good job, you have grownup furniture...I'm proud of you.) As for grad school, think of it this way: what job will this get me? What career do I want? Because grad school is for qualifying you for a career, not just a job. I chose a program that would allow me to do what I love for a living. I knew that I wanted to write, so that's what I pursued. If you don't know what field you'd like to go into, or what kind of job you want to do for the rest of your life, wait. Grad school is a huge commitment, and not something to rush into because you're feeling stagnant.

I love you. Hmu if you want to talk.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

Right now I'm self-soothing by looking at expensive leather purses on Etsy; I think that's what bothers me most--I feel very small-minded, like there is a bigger picture in front of me that I can't see. And logically I know that I'm doing well for myself, especially in comparison to my age group in general and the people who post on the r/personalfinance sub on Reddit, but part of me is saying, "Trying hard is not good enough!" (Partly because that is the title of the book we're using at work about evaluation methods, and it has really sunk in for me.) And a shitty thing (not the, just a) is that I've thought for a long time that I would like to study library/archival sciences, but is that something sustainable that I'm actually passionate about, or is it just some weird mental fixation I've gotten, like many other weird mental fixations?

Sigh. Thank you for reading all that mess. <3

[carlyinrome.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think your "trying hard isn't good enough!" thing might be an unreasonable (unreachable) goal.

Is there any way you can do some volunteer work or something in a library? Actually working in the field taught me that a career in medicine wasn't for me.

Also, your birthday present is set to arrive while you're at your conference thingie. Whoops.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

Hey, something to look forward to after the conference! And spending three hours in a car with my boss!

I'm not sure that volunteering at our county library would have the same benefit, because I'm not as interested in public-facing services, but it is worth a shot.

Just let out a legit heavy sigh. How did you prepare for taking the GRE? I have taken it once before and got near perfect scores on the writing and qualitative reasoning sections, but barely broke the 500s in the quantitative, so I need to study differently this time, clearly.

[sky-was-green.livejournal.com]

Butting in to let you know that while I did take the GRE, I didn't end up needing to send it to any of my library schools! So I would advise not stressing about it too much, unless you have a particular school in mind that requires it.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

Oh, that is excellent news. As I recall, it was an expensive test, so if I don't need to do it again, I'm definitely not going to.

[carlyinrome.livejournal.com]

Yeah, about the GRE... I may have only applied to schools that didn't require GRE scores. Because I am an adult who makes adult decisions.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

HAH. #rolemodel

[carlyinrome.livejournal.com]

I live large and take charge, Holly.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

Butting in to add my agreement to the your "trying hard isn't good enough!" thing might be an unreasonable (unreachable) goal pile.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

But. . . I NEED TO BE PERFECT.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

You can always try to be better but you are already enough.

[sky-was-green.livejournal.com]

Μεν I will happily chat library/archives with you if you'd like to chat library/archives, δε I have no idea how a greater picture of my life or anyone else's life works. (Mostly this does not bother me, but I would hate to represent myself as someone who is either capable or even attempting to become capable in this regard.)

Also happy early birthday!

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

If I'm a Greekling again, does this make you my wizened mentor? We can go with wise, too.

--What lead you to that field? Was it an outgrowth of the classics education, which is what I think it might be for me?
--How did you choose your program?
--Was finding a job extraordinarily difficult?
--What is a work day like for you?

Fix my life, Karen. Also, thank you!

[sky-was-green.livejournal.com]

I will accept either or both. And, as you know, am always happy to babble at people under the guise of informing them about stuff I have experienced.

-- It was (or more accurately, it seemed like) an outgrowth of classics. Mostly I knew I didn't want to go to classics grad school, and I thought "here is a way to have a career about learning stuff and also old things and preserving old things that does not involve archaeology or the tenure track."

What you need to know about this is that I was WRONG about the old stuff. If you want a career in old stuff, you want to look into special collections, more than archives, and most preservation-based jobs are a little closer to apprenticeship side of the spectrum than the rest of librarianship is -- it's more about the experience you've got (or can get) with your materials of choice.

It WAS a natural outgrowth of classics education in that I think classicists, by the nature of being willing to devote so much time and energy to learning for learning's sake, are often very passionate about enabling learning and information access in general.

-- I narrowed to places that had an ALA accredited ML(I)S that offered an archives concentration (rather than a straight MLS or a masters in archival science). I got into three of them, felt the vibes, and then went to the cheapest because it was WAY cheaper. (I hated it with a firey passion and wondered for a long time if I should have gone to Denver, but my work!buddy went to Denver and is sad enough about how much money it cost him that I feel like it was the right call.)

-- I super weirdly lucked into my job. I was tired of meaning to move to Boston and not moving to Boston, so I just moved to Boston and decided if that meant I couldn't get a library job so be it. Which meant I was temping with a lot of places that were super confused by my total lack of non-library work experience. But then a corporate library needed a temp library/archival assistant and put a call out for anyone with any library experience or an interest in history. And then I literally just never left. (In theory I could, but in practice I have discovered that I am very spoiled by corporate/special library pay and somewhat typecast in terms of future positions.) So, I ended up a pseudo medical librarian. Which is not where I saw this going, but still well within my personal scope of "I like helping people find the information they need."

-- I'm functionally a solo librarian, so I have three big buckets of work: 1) collection development (making sure all our journal subscriptions are the right ones and work and all that jazz and also sometimes buying books) 2) research and reference (Special librarians do a lot more "Yes I will do that research/analysis for you" than most other librarians will) and 3) Archival work (for digital, company materials with technical value that is long term for digital company materials but not done for long-term preservation).

So, yesterday involved a meeting to look at our archives priorities and potential stats we can pull on usage; a question about how to track use of our publications; trying to figure out how to find historic work we've done with particular partners; an external permissions request to use our stuff; sending out overdue notices; and reading through the latest update on enterprise data management at my company.

-- My big advice re: considering library school is to go after all the non-degreed level positions first. It will give you a sense of which sort of library you'd like to be in (and how much experience you need to get the degreed positions, which can vary pretty drastically by type) and give you a big leg up on the "straight out of undergrad; just not ready to go into the real world" yet MLIS-holders. Also because, even if you can afford to take an entry-level position post-MLIS, most libraries will not hire you for the entry level positions with the library degree.

Also, depending on what sort of library you end up in a non-degreed position, they may be willing to help fund your degree. (I think it's fairly rare these days, but probably less so in academic libraries where the school has a library program.)

That's my babble! Happy to babble more (here or via email which is just firstname@lastname.com)

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

This is EXCELLENT babble. Expanding access to information and research are both things that I am good at and care about. When you say medical librarian, does that translate to most of the research/analysis you do being related to the medical/healthcare fields?

How do I find non-degreed level positions? Is this as simple as googling "library jobs + non-degreed"? Spoiler alert, I may have done something very similar to that about twenty minutes ago.

[sky-was-green.livejournal.com]

It does. I'm at public health NGO, so the scope is a bit wider than it would otherwise be (if I were a "true" medical librarian at a hospital/med school). The newsletters I put together regularly are generally focused on things like HIV and Reproductive Health, but I do a lot with implementation research and management/governance resources, too.

They're generally not listed as non-degreed, but try assistant, clerk, or para-professional. Pages and shelvers are also non-degreed but also generally not full-time. (The non-degreed part is an absence of requiring the MLIS rather than spelled out explicitly).

Often, your local library association will have a job aggregator a la http://mblc.state.ma.us/jobs/find_jobs/ (PS consider joining the great classics contingent in Boston) local universities or library systems will have their own pages, too, if you've got specific targets in mind.

Archives stuff tends not to have such obvious patterns in keywords but turns up in most of the same places -- the universities up here have some great entry level archives stuff, but it's not always clear from the title what level of education/experience they're looking for.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

I didn't choose a career, I just found a job I could do that would keep paying me sufficiently that I could do other stuff that I enjoyed, and let me have enough free time to do that as well. Admittedly all my free time is getting filled up with socialising now that I'm not cripplingly insane so I have much less time for writing (and like you, I've taken to exercise to control fear, which eats up more time), BUT I don't think it matters as much as the typical narrative suggests that I'm not PURSUING THE DREAM OF BEING ~A THING~, I think it might be enough to be alive and to see people and to want to continue doing those things.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

I get that, and honestly I would be fine with a job and not a career if I also had other things that were important to me/that I enjoy doing. I think one issue I'm having is that I tend to dabble with things instead of diving deep (commitment issues?). My mom has always told me, "Work to live, don't live to work," but at the moment I am a sadsack detective on the verge of burnout who just doesn't have anything else. Part of this might be that I spent about 15 minutes on OkCupid Sunday night and wanted to burn the world down. Blah blah all my friends are married, blah blah it's so hard to meet people. I did RSVP to a MeetUp on Saturday for some mild hiking, so that's progress, and in general my mental health is the best it has ever been (thanks, Wellbutrin), except for the occasionally debilitating anxiety.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

OKC has that effect on me a lot of the time too and I don't even have to contend with the crap that having an "F" in the gender box on there immediately opens you up to. Condolences.

[also: hobbies!?]

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

HOBBIES. HOBBIES IS GOOD. Er, are. I went to a nearby state park last weekend and hiked up and back down a mountain. Legs were so sore the next day that I honestly considered sleeping on my couch rather than walking upstairs to my bed. I need to make time to do that more often, though, because I felt awesome afterward.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

"unreasonable amounts of exercise" appears to be my hobby at the moment so I can't actually scold you. Although based on recent experiences: did u kno history walking tours are actually KIND OF FUN??!! I did not.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

I WANNA GO ON A HISTORY WALKING TOUR. There is a ghost tour at the old courthouse in town in late October, but I already know about our famous syphilitic hillbilly murderer. To do: FIND NEAR-ISH HISTORY WALKING TOUR.

[sheathe.livejournal.com]

I have been there. I have been EXACTLY there.
So I studied nursing for a year.
Then that got to the point where it was costing me money and I could be earning dollars instead. So I went back to teaching.
And now I really enjoy that again.

I guess the moral is that sometimes you need a break, even if only for a year?

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

HAH. Yeah, breaks are good. I am writing this in the middle of a long weekend (4 days!), and even small breaks like this one help me feel re-energized. I thought coming home and working out was good for me, but I think I need to incorporate more outdoorsing into my day to day life.