Elisabeth > Recent Status Updates

I can imagine a chair for people engage through lenses of curiosity and empathy, not revenge or anger or dominance. Not with a priority, above all else, to be “right“.

Library work offers a critical person: one who can help separate what has happened from how an individual feels about it. With a neutral stance, they can provide information to help the patron decide how they actually feel, not just what an algorithm or podcast or article or institution or individual wants to sway them to feel.

If you become interested in the health of the place where you are, whether that’s cultural or biological or both, I have a warning: you will see more destruction than progress. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

And when I looked even further back down the road, I was exiting to the optimistic, determined woman in Buffalo, who became a librarian. I recognize only that I wish I could’ve done and cared more for her. Moving to California felt in some ways like a way to reclaim some selfish life for her.

I would define empathy fatigue as the physically and emotionally, painful and complicated consequence of repeated exposure to stressful traumatic events. It most often results from working directly with victims of disasters, trauma illness. Social workers, healthcare workers, firefighters, journalists, teachers, and librarians, are all particularly susceptible to experiencing it.

But the letter also serves as a reminder to me that the lower you are on the socioeconomic ladder, the more your moral character is dependent on your work ethic and how productive you can be.

This is the gift of an honest reckoning with their past: freedom to move forward, with truth, in truth. However, painful it may be, in the collective or individual process, we eventually come to better and more completely understand the world around us and how we might do better.

Famed astronomer an astrophysicist Carl Sagan hits a little closer to a more complete truth about libraries: “the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of her culture, and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.“

Because we can fail, success makes us happy, and that happiness can rub off on other people. Even when we make a mess of things, our efforts may help to establish a bond of trust.

Money is nothing more than a convenient tool

Unless a friend shares a particular interest, inviting them to come along might feel like asking a favor snd thus puts you in their debt.

Rather than all around friends, people seem to have friends for specific purposes - friends to go drinking with, for example, or friends to play computer games with, and friends to go to concerts with.

Humans thrive on shared connection — instead of resisting and turning away supports in your life, remind yourself that the people who offer help are receiving as well.

Guilt = made a mistake
Shame = feel wring as a whole person. Feeling of otherness or of not belonging

Shame shows up in 2 main forms in our minds: “you are never good enough” and “who do you think you are?”

For many of us, inner critics are the voices of people who were an instrumental force in our childhood.

Falling into the martyr mode (MM) trap doesn’t always correlate to clinical diagnosis; it’s a role women can inhabit while also being highly functioning and excelling in their lives. On the inside, however, when a woman is stuck in MM, she’s convinced herself that the best way to make choices is to put herself last. MM makes it feel like life is happening to u, as opposed to u being the agent of ur own life.

How do you know if you’re falling in martyr mode? A telltale sign is when you extend yourself towards others and an unspoken expectation that something – praise, support, attention – will be given in return. When that expectation is not met, you lose your cool and are secretly (or rather not so secretly) seething.

For now, remember that you can only fully enjoy the good NEW things in your life if you are making space by clearing out the obligations that no longer serve you.

If you don’t build this muscle of disappointing others with the little stuff, and thereby create a thicker skin to the judgment, you might face, you’ll end up, betraying yourself when it comes to the big stuff – and you might find yourself moving forward in a relationship or in a career that isn’t right for you.

The problem with this mentality is that the longer you stick with a relationship, a job, or a situation that isn’t working for you, the higher the emotional cost becomes to eventually set a boundary.

Over time, Tonya was able to recognize that the feelings of guilt were not a moral judgement on her, but instead an internalization of a lifetime of conditioning to serve everyone before herself.