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

[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.