love hurts

As I get more experience with chat reference, my dread of it has been dissipating. The more questions I answer, the more confident I become in my ability to find answers even when those answers aren’t at the ready. I am hardly free of anxiety, of course, so to help alleviate it, I have established a routine: just before my shift begins, I open one tab of my browser to the chat, another to the library’s FAQs, another to the main page of the library’s website, and another to the transcripts of recent chats. I read all of the transcripts. I want to know what kinds of questions have been asked recently, and I want to learn how my colleagues have answered them.

Reading the transcripts, I noticed that as the spring semester came to an end, more questions were getting asked, especially in the evening, and many of them were asked with a tone of urgency or desperation. More than once, a statement like the following came up: Between my job and taking care of my kid, I’m trying to get this project done, and it’s due soon, and I don’t even know where to begin.

I want more than anything to be able to do right by such students. Given that I, too, am a student, still learning, how can I do so? In “Library Anxiety: A Grounded Theory and Its Development,” Constance A. Mellon describes how her research into students’ fears of the library led to a redesign of the library instruction for composition students at her school. Instead of trying to pack as much information as possible on search strategies and tools into one 50-minute session, the goal became to “help students see the library as a great place with fascinating information and warm, friendly people available to help them.”

Though I certainly don’t have all the answers, I am certainly capable of looking for them in a warm and friendly manner. And no matter how anxious I might feel, I can hold that anxiety. I don’t like feeling anxious, but really it’s no big deal. I’m not in any danger during my chat reference shifts. The anxiety arises, it fades away, and meanwhile I can show an overwhelmed student at least where to begin their search.

I’m not talking here about the anxieties that wake me before dawn and gnaw at my heart—anxieties about our climate of intensifying storms and wildfires, violence, and barely checked contagion. I’m talking about everyday anxiety, which may tap into those deeper anxieties but still just comes and goes. Tolerating this anxiety is necessary for far more than chat reference. If I’m going to be able to take care of anyone, I have to be willing to feel bad. I can bear it. I have the resources to take care of myself.

And when I say that “love hurts,” I’m not talking about the disappointment of unrequited love (though that certainly hurts, too). I’m talking about how much suffering there is in this world and how much we grieve for others. Like everyone else, I often feel helpless, but I do my best to do what I can do. Sometimes the work of alleviating suffering is putting together a spreadsheet, as I began to do this weekend, helping to collect and organize information on how to get mail and print publications into prisons. (It is becoming harder and harder to do so.) Just looking at the home page of one state’s Department of Corrections depressed me, and I had to walk away from the task for a while. But I came back to it. Love hurts, but love is also what helps to alleviate that hurt.

This post is a day later than planned, alas. Nevertheless, I continue to make plans: posts on Tuesdays through June and July, and then a break in August. We’ll see what actually happens. Take care!! xox