Find the Cracks: That’s How the Light Gets In. on reclaiming joy in library work without losing yourself to it
I get asked a lot to do something that feels contradictory to me, and I’ve been struggling with it for a while. How to reground librarians in their work or help librarians find joy in their work. I think this topic is both incredibly important and it makes me anxious because it feels like it could slide into vocational awe very easily, either on my part or through the interpretation of the audience. The word “joy” has been everywhere lately, and I worry it’s starting to sound like toxic positivity, like we’re asking people to feel better about hard situations instead of changing the situations.
But I keep coming back to something Fobazi Ettarh said. One of the questions she gets often is whether she’s saying we’re not allowed to love our jobs. And she’s clear: that’s not what she’s saying. We spend most of our lives at work. It should be a place where you feel good.[i] And that we need multiple ways to survive, work is just one of those.
Vocational awe, the idea that libraries as institutions are inherently sacred, which can compel employees to sacrifice their own well-being for the mission, is a trap.[ii] It’s a particularly insidious one because it looks like dedication. It takes the genuine care many of us have for this work and turns it into a mechanism for accepting conditions we shouldn’t accept. It teaches us that to push back is to be insufficiently committed. That rest is selfish. That our identity and the job should be one and the same.
Joy that comes from that place isn’t joy. It’s awe. Awe isn’t just about wonder and beauty, it’s about fear and dread too.[iii]
It is impossible to talk about joy in libraries right now without talking about Mychal Threets. Not just what he’s built, the platform, the presence, the way he talks about libraries that reaches people who had no idea they needed to hear it. But also, how he got there and responses to it.[iv] The way he talks about joy is grounded in genuine love for this work and for the people libraries serve.
We need to be able to have and hold that joy while simultaneously not allowing it to become permission for abuse and self-sacrifice.
The “choose a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” idea or quote is one we’ve all heard.
Instead I like this quote from Adam J. Kurtz, author of Things Are What You Make of Them: Life Advice for Creatives
“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation and no boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.”
A lot of us believed the first when we came into this profession. The problem isn’t loving the work. The problem is when that joy and dedication get used to justify everything else – the low pay, the overwork, the expectation that your passion makes up for what the institution won’t provide. Fobazi said we need multiple things to survive.[v] Work is one part of a full life, not a substitute for the rest of it.
Passion can also be weaponized. When passion becomes proof of worth, when being truly committed means saying yes to everything, staying late, absorbing more than your share, taking on work that you don’t have the capacity for, taking on work that isn’t yours, it stops being about you and starts being about what the institution or society can extract from you. Because often the library is asked to take on more because other resources and services are being cut. But what that really means is that librarians and library staff are taking on more. It’s not just the library itself that’s extracting from us, but the community, the local government, the university. The library is a building, it does not function without the people, and yet we so often ask as if it is a being while ignoring the labor that makes it real.
That doesn’t mean you have to abandon your passion. It means holding onto it while also holding onto yourself.
Ettarh is also clear that library identity is not a 24/7 identity. The sense that being a librarian is something you are, not something you do, is something I see a lot, and something I struggle with personally. But you (we, me) need an identity outside librarianship. Not because the work isn’t worth doing or doesn’t matter, but because you are a whole person, and the job is not all of you. When things get hard, or the institution fails you, or you just need rest, you need something to come home to that isn’t work.
Rest Is Not Selfish.
Rest Is Political. Audre Lorde wrote that caring for yourself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare. And when we use this reference, we just acknowledge that Lorde was a queer black woman who spent much of her life fighting for rights who wrote these works after being diagnosed with cancer for the second time.[vi]
In a profession shaped by the expectation of self-sacrifice, choosing to actually rest is a form of resistance.[vii] The idea that rest is lazy is part of the same system that benefits from your exhaustion. Taking your vacation and sick days, not answering email at 11pm, protecting time that is yours, is important to your physical and mental well-being.
The Long Haul
Library careers are long, whether that looks like being the children’s librarian for 30 years, moving into management roles, or changing libraries for something new. The people who sustain those careers are not the ones who gave everything in year three. They’re the ones who figured out how to pace themselves and take care of themselves along the way. The institution will keep asking. You have to be the one who decides when enough is enough.
Find the Cracks
The cracks are where the light gets in.* The small, specific, real moments that make this work meaningful – the patron who came back to tell you what happened, the student who found what they didn’t know they were looking for, the program that actually worked. Those moments are real. The work is to protect them. To understand that sustainable joy requires boundaries, and an identity outside the job, and the ability to critique the institution even while caring about the work.
When I talk about joy and reconnecting with your roots, and regrounding, I want to be clear about what I mean and what I don’t. I don’t mean pep talks or productivity hacks or asking people to feel better about structural problems. I’m not interested in those conversations.
What I do mean: you’re allowed to feel good in this work. You’re allowed to love parts of it. You’re allowed to find meaning here, as long as you don’t have to sacrifice yourself to the institution to do it.
Find the cracks. That’s how the light gets in. And then protect them like your career depends on it, because it does.
Photo by Joe Dudeck on Unsplash* I was inspired to finish this draft this morning after watching an episode of Fringe last night (Season 2, Episode 21, titled “Northwest Passage”). I stole the line from there. An internet search this morning reminded me this based on a Leonard Cohen lyric.
References Recommended Reading
“Definition of AWE.” May 30, 2026. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/awe.
“Student Snippets : School of Library and Information Science : Simmons University.” https://slis-students.simmons.edu.
“Vocational Awe and Librarianship | Califa.” Accessed June 4, 2026. https://califa.org/self-care/vocational-awe.
Atske, Sara. “News Platform Fact Sheet.” Digital News Landscape. Pew Research Center, September 25, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-platform-fact-sheet/.
Bryony Porteous-Sebouhian. “Audre Lorde, Self-Care and Its Roots in Black History | MHT.” Mental Health Today, October 27, 2021. https://www.mentalhealthtoday.co.uk/blog/awareness/why-acknowledging-and-celebrating-the-black-feminist-origins-of-self-care-is-essential.
Calfia. “Vocational Awe and Librarianship.” https://califa.org/self-care/vocational-awe.
Caron, Christina. “Librarians Face a Crisis of Violence and Abuse.” Well. The New York Times, October 31, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/well/mind/librarian-trauma-homeless-drugs-mental-illness.html.
Cho, Allan. Remembering Self-Care and Vocational Awe in the Post-Pandemic World. March 6, 2024. https://www.allancho.com/2024/03/remembering-self-care-and-vocational.html.
Ettarh, Fobazi. “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, January 10, 2018. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/.
Flanigan, Abby. “Vocational Awe and Professional Identity.” First Year Academic Librarian Experience. ACRLog, January 12, 2018. https://acrlog.org/2018/01/12/vocational-awe-and-professional-identity/.
Flanigan, Abby. Vocational Awe and Professional Identity – ACRLog. First Year Academic Librarian Experience. January 12, 2018. https://acrlog.org/2018/01/12/vocational-awe-and-professional-identity/.
Hersey, Tricia. Rest Is Resistance: Free Yourself from Grind Culture and Reclaim Your Life. Aster, 2024.
Keach, Jennifer, Jenne Klotz, and Galen Talis. “Leading with Joy: Lessons from the Literature.” Libraries, July 25, 2024. https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/letfspubs/249.
Newman-Bremang, Kathleen. “Reclaiming Audre Lorde’s Radical Self-Care.” Refinery29, May 28, 2021. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/05/10493153/reclaiming-self-care-audre-lorde-black-women-community-care.
Oregon Library Association, host. S4, E5: Escaping the Vocational Awe Trap w/Fobazi Ettarh (Re-Release). OVERDUE: Weeding Out Oppression in Libraries. August 29, 2025. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1948067/episodes/17732368-s4-e5-escaping-the-vocational-awe-trap-w-fobazi-ettarh-re-release.
Oregon Library Association, host. S4, E5: Escaping the Vocational Awe Trap w/Fobazi Ettarh (Re-Release). OVERDUE: Weeding Out Oppression in Libraries. August 29, 2025. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1948067/episodes/17732368-s4-e5-escaping-the-vocational-awe-trap-w-fobazi-ettarh-re-release.
Phillips, Abigail L. “Beyond Self-Care in Libraries: Supporting Ourselves Through Real Change.” March 19, 2024. https://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Beyond-SelfCare-in-Libraries-Supporting-Ourselves-Through-Real-Change-162859.asp.
Yazeed, Dr Carey. “Mychal The Librarian and the Attack on Black Men Vulnerability.” Substack newsletter. The Misadventures of a Retired Hot Girl, March 2, 2024. https://retiredhotgirl.substack.com/p/mychal-the-librarian-and-the-attack.
[i] Oregon Library Association, host, S4, E5: Escaping the Vocational Awe Trap w/Fobazi Ettarh (Re-Release), OVERDUE: Weeding Out Oppression in Libraries, August 29, 2025, https://www.buzzsprout.com/1948067/episodes/17732368-s4-e5-escaping-the-vocational-awe-trap-w-fobazi-ettarh-re-release.
[ii] Fobazi Ettarh, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, January 10, 2018, https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/.
[iii] “Definition of AWE,” May 30, 2026, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/awe.
[iv] Dr Carey Yazeed, “Mychal The Librarian and the Attack on Black Men Vulnerability,” Substack newsletter, The Misadventures of a Retired Hot Girl, March 2, 2024, https://retiredhotgirl.substack.com/p/mychal-the-librarian-and-the-attack; Christina Caron, “Librarians Face a Crisis of Violence and Abuse,” Well, The New York Times, October 31, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/well/mind/librarian-trauma-homeless-drugs-mental-illness.html.
[v] Oregon Library Association, S4, E5.
[vi] Bryony Porteous-Sebouhian, “Audre Lorde, Self-Care and Its Roots in Black History | MHT,” Mental Health Today, October 27, 2021, https://www.mentalhealthtoday.co.uk/blog/awareness/why-acknowledging-and-celebrating-the-black-feminist-origins-of-self-care-is-essential; Kathleen Newman-Bremang, “Reclaiming Audre Lorde’s Radical Self-Care,” Refinery29, May 28, 2021, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/05/10493153/reclaiming-self-care-audre-lorde-black-women-community-care.
[vii] Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: Free Yourself from Grind Culture and Reclaim Your Life (Aster, 2024).
#joy #Librarians #Libraries #LibraryStaff #libraryWorkers #selfCare #vocationalAwe
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