lismicroaggressions:

Hello there. I would first off like to express my sincere fandom and appreciation for your archive and of your Facebook posts. As a queer/lesbian Latina, I find your posts and sharing of digital resources on your Facebook account essential to my everyday social media digest of queer and lesbian visibility. Through your posts I often discover documentaries, printed material, and online resources about queer and lesbian herstories that I was not aware of before or resources I had no idea were freely accessible online. Furthermore, as a Los Angeles native I particularly love the materials you post about local lesbian social life. 

I am writing this message because yesterday you shared two images of your archive that you identified as ‘international’. After reading the images, I responded with a comment to your post: 

“Are you sure these are international? I see Los Angeles clearly printed in one of these images. Also the term ‘latina’ usually refers to female identified people living in the US”. 

I was looking for clarification on the erroneous assumption that Spanish language material comes from international origins. From the images you posted, I was able to discern that one flyer was promoting an event put on by a group called LAPIS at the Friendship Auditorium at 3201 Riverside Dr. Los Angeles; the other, an image of a magazine or journal, did not have a title, location or address, though it identified itself as a magazine for Latina lesbians. A cursory Google search led me to the magazine’s World Cat catalog record, which identifies esto no tiene nombre as a publication that ran from 1991-1994 and was based in Miami, Florida.

I find it troubling that my comment was not acknowledged or responded to, in fact, it was subsequently deleted and the post altered. The word ‘international’ was changed to ‘interesting’ and other images were added that may, in fact, be of international origin. As a practicing archivist that works to be as inclusive as possible of stories that have been historically marginalized and silenced by omission and erasure, I am disconcerted at your choices on how to deal with this situation. A simple comment like “whoops! yes, thank you for catching that!” would have sufficed. Instead of an acknowledgment of your error and an awareness of your presumed assumption, you chose to alter your post and silence me.

As a founding member of the LIS Microaggressions collective these types of situations are the reason collective members have come together to fight for the space to publicly acknowledge the ways LIS professionals that belong to marginalized groups are assumed and microaggressed. Your assumption that those resources in your archive are international is a microaggression about Spanish language materials and where they come from. Your choice to alter and silence instead of acknowledging or recognizing a simple error is a macroaggression located on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality that speaks deeper on power dynamics of authority between the archive and its users.

I write to you not to accuse you, but to look for dialogue in hopes that, in the future, you do not deter your users from engaging with you about your collections. Please consider giving your users the platform to be able to correct you about your own collections. After all, isn’t increasing engagement with our users what we are after as a profession? What’s the point of sharing our collections with our users if we are not open to dialogue with them and are not open to recognize our wrongs when they are made apparent through our users?

You can do better.
And we, as a profession, can do better.

My best,

Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez
Processing Archivist for Latin American Collections
Princeton University

We can’t ever move past racial microaggressions without acknowledging our mistakes and apologizing for them. 

jenlabarbera:

(Reviving this very inactive tumblr for LIS Mental Health Week.)

I’ve spent most of my life stubbornly keeping myself alive while dealing with the symptoms and struggles of PTSD - depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, various versions of disordered eating. I’ve come a long, long way from the 15-year-old that was diagnosed and then hospitalized, but in so many ways, I’m still that person. Most of those super destructive coping mechanisms have fallen away and I’ve settled into much healthier options to deal with my brain, but I still have to keep my bottle of Xanax on hand for surprise flares of anxiety, and I still occasionally have to call in sick because I just can’t bring myself to get dressed and go to work. (This happened a lot last year, when my depression & anxiety were compounded by severe impostor syndrome, Boston’s gray and sun-less severe winter, a lackluster support system, almost exclusively white workplaces/libraryland colleagues, and also that severe impostor syndrome bears repeating.) 

Keep reading

kellymce:

I’m going to try to write a little thing each day this week, for LIS Mental Health Week. It seems right to start with a little story about myself.

I suffer from depression. It’s pretty common – NAMI estimates that 7% of adults in the US suffer at least one major depression in a year. Women are more likely than men to suffer from depression. (And yes, library workers are more likely to be women.) 

The first time I got treatment for depression was in high school. My parents did a sort of intervention, took me out of school one morning to get pancakes and talk about what was going on. I don’t actually remember what they had noticed, but they were worried about me. I went to a therapist, did a lot of worksheets, and eventually felt better. I will always be grateful that my parents were (and are) supportive of mental health treatment – more than once, I’ve quoted my mom to friends who are struggling, that “if you have access to free therapy, you should take it.” (Still totally true! Get it when you can!)

But, one of the things about depression is, one episode is likely to be followed by another. I’ve had a few over the years, and even when I’m doing fine, it’s in the back of my mind, that another one is probably coming. And yet, the funny thing is: depression numbs me out, so when it actually happens, it takes longer for me to notice than for the people around me. More than once, it has been a sweetie, or a friend, who gently asks what’s going on.

Mostly, my depression doesn’t interfere with my work – it has been a long time since I’ve had an episode that left me unable to get out of bed – but there is certainly an interplay. About a year and a half ago, I moved to take a new job. I looooove my work, and I am often amazed at what I get to do what I do daily. However, moving also took me away from a hard-won community of friends, a network that helped keep me together. When I took this job, I did something I’d said I would never do again: I moved to a place where I didn’t know anyone. Without that local support network, it was a slow slide back into depression. Some of my cues? I kept waking up exhausted, no matter how much sleep I got. Making dinner seemed insurmountable and I kept eating whatever required nothing more than boiling water. When people asked me what I did for fun in my new town, I just…stared at them and mumbled something about how I was…working on it.

And, even though my parents raised me to be open about mental health, even though my sweetie is training to be a therapist, even though I have made lots of zines about emotions – it was hard for me to admit that the depression was back. Even to myself. It always is, because it always feels like a bit of a failure. Stigma, eh?

And yet, it is also a relief to acknowledge it and step towards treatment. It isn’t about fixing something that is broken in me, it is about helping me and my brain figure out a way to do well in this world. Therapy, of different kinds, have worked for me over the years, but it also means exercising regularly; it means finding a network of friends; it means being purposeful in what I take on. As a librarian, it means stepping away from perfectionism; it means recognizing that public service – as much as I love it – can take a lot out of me. It means recognizing that I don’t have to do everything all at once, and reminding myself that I am here for the long haul.

I keep thinking about what Maria Accardi wrote this morning about mistaking depression for burnout, and how dangerous it is to assume that distress is some kind of normal. I have a lot of thoughts about the cultural construction of mental illness – and about mental illness as a defensive response to a messed-up world – but I’ll save those for another time. What I want to say is, if I’m bringing my whole self to work, that means that sometimes I’m bringing my depression, too.

“As a librarian, it means stepping away from perfectionism; it means recognizing that public service – as much as I love it – can take a lot out of me.” resonates for me especially.