Elisabeth’s Reviews > Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library > Status Update

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.