It’s finals week at my university, and naturally that leads to reflection on the semester that has just passed us by. I have learned, time and time again, that I do some of my best processing by writing about it. So let’s just come right out and say it: this has been an incredibly hard fall semester for me. This is my third go-around as an academic librarian, and there’s some sense of knowing what to expect at this point; perhaps that was my fatal error, because I couldn’t have predicted where this semester went.
I had a lot of energy at the beginning. I think a lot of us do come August, because we’ve got library instruction sessions lined up and the campus suddenly comes back alive when the students either arrive or return. We had a new librarian on our team and that in itself was exciting. September was relatively normal – things progressed just as they typically do. October is where everything fell off the rails.
Without going too deeply into the details, I lost someone that I considered a parental figure mid-October. My job was beautifully supportive of me during this time, because I had to be in Michigan (I work in Maryland) for about two and a half weeks. They entered hospice on October 3rd, and they were gone on October 14th – a mere 11 days. As instruction librarians will already note, this is often peak library session time. No one but myself made me feel this way, but I felt guilty about cancelling classes or shifting them to some of my coworkers. I wouldn’t call myself type A, but I do tend to hold myself to a high level (subsequently leading to burnout, though I’ve gotten much better at avoiding this as the years pass). I was prematurely thinking about the dip in my number of classes for my annual review, the responsibilities and writing I was putting off, and how that might affect my application for promotion next year.
Which is all scary to admit out loud (in blog format, anyway). While I was in the deepest throes of grief, barely able to comprehend eating on a regular basis, I worried about my job. Sounds incredibly American, doesn’t it? I rattled off an email to my dean and chair about an hour after it happened telling them that this person was gone, and in the same breath I wrote “I’ll be mostly out this week.” Reading it back, I 1) don’t really even remember sending this and 2) have an immediate reaction of, duh, you’ll be out; Emily, you didn’t need to update them so soon. I also am so, so grateful for the grace in their responses back to me, and throughout the time I was away. I won’t be sharing them because they never wrote them thinking they’d be in a blog post someday.
The funeral came and went, and the next day I was on a plane back to Maryland. I went back to work the following day, to an overflowing email inbox, to meetings, to a hybrid instruction session. I wore a hoodie previously owned by the person that I lost; having it around me felt like a lifeline while I tried to keep a game face for that entire Thursday. I could have easily just come back that following Monday, but I think at that point I really needed some semblance of my regular routine. Both things can be true at once, that it was one of the hardest days of work I’ve ever had and that it was needed for me to continue processing my loss by getting back to my life.
Not long after my first day back, we had the U.S. presidential election as well as a harrowing (alleged) situation at my university announced that same day, November 5th. We all know how that election went, and the aftershocks of that event are still being felt at the university. I was in my lowest of lows, and unsure of where to direct the frustrated, scared energy that felt like it overflowed from me. One place was my previous post here on ACRLog; it honestly felt like I couldn’t do anything else until that was written and published. I have the platform, and I wanted to use it. I also ended up finishing a crochet blanket that my lost person had begun, which is the cover photo of this post. My pace is just simply slower right now, and I’m doing my best to be okay with it.
I know that this post is certainly not as library-related some of the absolutely stellar posts lately by our first-year academic librarians and other bloggers, but I just wanted to say: if this fall semester also sucked for you, I see you, and solidarity. Being an academic librarian is not the only, or even the primary, aspect of my personhood. It would be disingenuous to try and write a post focused solely on some issue within that realm in this season of my life. I hope the end of December and the coming new year brings you all rest, relaxation, and maybe even some bits of hope.