I remember a meeting that took place in one of my first years at TRU, where the main item of discussion was how to secure the print collection on the third floor of the House of Learning Library while the desk there was unstaffed. Logistics and costs of building a wall or pulling a gate were thrown around for a while until I decided to ask what (to me) was the obvious question:
“Why don’t we just leave the books open?”
The then-University Librarian (who, since leaving TRU, has continued to inexplicably fail mostly laterally) smirked at me, made a comment about how young I was, and patted my head. I spent the rest of the meeting seeing red.
Of the many reasons I wanted to quit in my first years here, that incident was at least in the top 5. But until this week, I haven’t thought about it in a very long time.
This semester, one of my main projects was to investigate the library service hours and to make recommendations. That project itself was incredibly interesting and worthy of at least one post of its own, so I won’t get into too many details here. However, the upshot of that work was that I wrote a report recommending primarily that the library space and collection stay open for student use during all building hours, including those when the service desk is unstaffed. That report was accepted, and the changes are being implemented for the Fall.
I am not so young anymore. At best guess, that meeting took place 7 years ago, which is either a blip or a very long time indeed depending on how you look at it. The former UL likely has no recollection of it at all, nor do I think she would care. But for me, at least, a lot has changed. I’ve been through tenure, two promotions, department chair. Seven years didn’t change my view; it just changed the likelihood of me being listened to. And that reccommendation I made didn’t come from my view alone; it came from a long process of consultation where it turned out a lot of people felt the same way but almost every one of them assumed their view was an outlier.
Success for me feels a lot like catharsis. I’m doing well because I’ve caught up with a past wound and healed it. I feel it in my parenting, I felt it in the last bargaining round when we got the unqualified rate removed, and I feel it now. I like being listened to, knowing my words have weight; but it’s also a reminder not to get too comfortable, that I should have been taken seriously even when I was weightless, and that power’s proper end is for healing.