Recently an article at The Free Press which attributed the decline of the public library to the fact that they’ve become homeless shelters has been causing some chatter in some online librarian communities. While looking into it, this book was mentioned and I decided to give it a shot. As an urban librarian, I can testify that homeless patrons have become an everyday part of my working life, including mentally ill and often physically aggressive ‘patrons’ who have precipitated our installing panic buttons at desks throughout the building. Patrons who have witnessed the kind of drama we see on a weekly basis have often whispered, “Y’all need a cop up in here!”. Overdue is a memoir from a librarian who served in a Washington, DC library with such security concerns that female staffers were not advised to go into the stacks by themselves for fear of being accosted. It details a lot of the stress that Oliver and her colleagues endured on a daily basis the fear of being attacked, the anxiety caused by being thrust into social worker and first responder positions with no training or real support from the board, and the psychological drain that spending all day listening to people talk to themselves takes on a person.

As interesting as that element was, her chronic self loathing detracted enormously from it: regardless how stressed she is, Oliver hates herself for not being up to it, and appears to dislike that libraries are not completely re-orienting themselves (i.e. installing public showers) for this new ‘mission’. When the city assigns a police officer to monitor the branch, she feels utterly relieved at his presence, and simultaneously hates herself for feeling relieved that now there’s an armed man standing between her and her frequently-menacing public. (Not surprisingly, she burns out, quits, and is diagnosed with PTSD.) The memoir is only perhaps a third of this book, though, as there’s also an obnoxious history of public libraries that makes men like Benjamin Franklin — who created a lending library for a club he’d also created — out to be villains because their privately-created and self-financed library wasn’t inclusive enough. Her self-loathing and long train of irritating PC writing (capitalizing White, Black, and Brown like these are ethnicities, for instance) made for a generally tiresome read despite the salience that parts of the book had for me. I recognized, for instance, her need to completely retreat from social interactions for a time after work — though whereas I turtle-up for an hour, she confesses to withdrawing completely. It does provoke the question, though — what is the mission of the modern library, and how can American societies better respond to the mental illness crisis in a way that doesn’t simply shove it into the laps of librarians and cops?

Related:
Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and how People and Communities can Heal, Brrett Ann Stanciu. A librarian is shaken by an opiod addict’s death near her library and starts digging deeper.

Quotes:

Generally, I didn’t mind reshelving, but I tried to never linger in the area. Male coworkers had warned me early on not to—female employees were particularly vulnerable back there. If something was going to go wrong, it was going to go wrong
in the Adult Fiction area.

As we approached the second door, he explained that if I’d started the day before, we wouldn’t have met because he’d been in court. A patron named Ms. Lee was suing him for the third time. He quickly explained that Ms. Lee thought she was responsible
for creating a secret café on top of the Spy Museum at the behest of the FBI.

[L]ibrarians expect to encounter people from many backgrounds, experiences, and moods. Empathy is an essential part of the work if you want to do it in any meaningful way. Find empathy before anger, fear, or confusion. Find empathy before you lose your cool. Find empathy before you lose your shit. Empathy is a first line of defense in public servant jobs—people are less likely to yell at a calm and patient person.

The actual work of being a public librarian, of showing up to that same building five days a week to perform an unending range of tasks in an environment that was unpredictable, chaotic, and sometimes violent, had warped everything in my life. If someone had told me ten years earlier when I first entered my MLS program that this would be the trajectory of my career, and that I would be diagnosed with complex PTSD in large part because of my work as a librarian, I don’t think I would have believed
them.

“I’ve found myself becoming more cynical and jaded as a librarian. I also find it disheartening that so few people outside the library realize just how much library workers put up with. It’s like a dirty secret people are fearful to talk about. We have to put on this happy, cheery facade of ‘everything is fine’ for fear of what? Losing public funding? I can’t even decompress and share the horrors of my experience with nonlibrary people because the attitude is ‘you read books all day, how bad can it be.’”

In a 2009 speech to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point, author and literary critic William Deresiewicz cautioned the graduates about their constant exposure to social and news media: “You are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a
cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s
yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.”