learning to be useful

dispatch 36

Whew. Hello friends! ‘Tis February, the month I didn’t think would ever come. I made it through my massive work project and am finding myself again on the other side. I’m focusing on moving my body, on caring for it, and on waking up the creative spark that got a little smothered under all of that stress.

I also started training as an herbalist and it’s SUCH a joy to be learning something new again. I’m flying through books and I have a desire to clean and organize everything around me. It feels like coming alive. I hope that wherever this finds you, you’re finding moments of aliveness too. Get into your weirdest project! Read that book that keeps popping up for you! Thrift that piece of clothing you’re just a littleee scared to wear! Go wild, friends!

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Can’t stop, won’t stop taking pictures of street art

learning to be useful

I spend one night each week volunteering at my local library. It’s part of my larger effort to find my place in this city that I love, to build more local community, to contribute; and it has quickly become one of my favorite times of the week. I’m a circulation assistant, meaning that when you send your returned items down shoots into anonymous bins, I am one of the people who retrieves and sorts them. If it is a slow night and there is nothing for me to put away in the particular section for which I am responsible, I wander the shelves, making sure that my section is in order. Almost anyone could do the tasks I am responsible for, and I am one of many volunteers. 

This week, I spent most of my time re-alphabetizing the Jazz CDs. It will not surprise you that this section is not particularly overrun with patrons and so I was mostly able to keep to myself. In my daily life I barrage myself with sound and information, often listening to a podcast whilst doing multiple tasks. Because of this, the quiet of the library feels almost alive when I find myself suspended within it. The quiet becomes my constant companion in focus as I try to remember which letter comes next in the alphabet or which label indicates that an item belongs in the children’s section. For someone who spent a remarkable amount of my childhood and young adult life in libraries, I have never managed to grasp the organizational system, but I am slowly learning.

My weekly shift is my evening of preserved peace in which I am a semi-anonymous presence. What I have come to value about it most is that it is an evening of my week in which I do not have to strive. I do not strive to be special. I don’t strive to be the best volunteer, the one who takes on the most or moves fastest. I don’t try to come up with the funniest remark, or have the correct opinion, to be the most likeable. I am part of a larger organism in which everyone’s role is equally important and unimportant. In which we work together to maintain something larger than ourselves. 

The lesson that I am learning in every moment of every quiet hour, with every click of a CD cover, every thump of books dropping into a return bin, is simply how to be useful. In a world where we are constantly told we must be exceptional, small words like useful and helpful are pushed aside. So much of my day-to-day from the time I started kindergarten through to my current daily employment, are spent striving. My years as an athlete were focused on being the fastest and the strongest. My time on social media was focused on being funny and showing the correct aspects of my life in the correct way at the correct time. We’re taught to take up space and stand out and yes, that is often good advice. But, is it good advice for all of the time? What do I lose when I spend so many moments trying to make myself something else?

I love libraries. Because they are quiet and full of books, but also because they are one of the only places in which I can see the future I hope for already existing. A free place where you can come to be warm, to share resources, to learn. A place that is open to everyone that respects it. A place with something for everyone.

I believe in futures like the ones I see in libraries. I know that there is enough for everyone if we can all move with honesty and respect, and we’re all willing to contribute. And I know that sometimes the thing that needs to be done is not the biggest, shiniest thing, but instead the smallest, most anonymous thing. The things that keep us all afloat are not the biggest and the brightest, but the simple tasks that bring no glory. I find myself doing too few of them. 

But in the library, pushing my cart across the well-worn carpet, I am useful. And simply being useful is enough. It was in a moment of simply being useful that I met one of my young neighbors who has read every book at his age level about horses. In another, that I felt my heart swell up at the sight of the young person feverishly reading through the archive of queer graphic novels, the plastic covers crackling in their hands. When I opened up a returned Yo-Yo Ma CD to find, tucked into the song notes, a folded, handwritten letter from a concerned patron letting me know exactly where the CD skips. In these moments, our mutual care brushes against each other, these strangers and I. Because I’m not trying to tell the world who I am in every moment, I am learning who the people around me are. And that feels worth something I didn’t even know I was missing. It feels like a little bit of freedom.

Assorted, rad things: 

A section of this newsletter where I share what I have been reading, watching, or otherwise consuming lately.

• The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen: I had been hearing about this trilogy for awhile and finally picked it up for the library…it’s absolutely stunning! The length of one regular book, the trilogy follows Ditlevsen from her childhood where she dreamed of being a poet, through her early jobs and time as a young person in pre-WW2 Denmark, her four marriages, and eventually her drug addiction and attempts at recovery. The last book is pretty brutal so read with caution if hearing about active addiction isn’t something you can do right now.

• The Electricity Of Every Living Thing by Katherine May: I loved May’s book Wintering so much and while I didn’t get as much out of this one, she’s a great writer and her dark humor gets me every time. About her journey on the South West Coast Path in England as she begins to identify as autistic and seek support from loved ones and the medical system. I loved the examination of what it means to learn something new about yourself in your late 30s and the social aspect of claiming an identity that is new to you.

• Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus on the If Books Could Kill podcast: I love this pod from my beloved Michael Hobbes on the worst books of the last 50 years. I obviously never read this book, which is probably one of the many, many reasons I made a terrible straight person, but wow this guy absolutely hates his wife and probably all women and is deeply puzzled by such basic feelings and needs such as: wanting to be listened to, not wanting to be abandoned, asking your partner to do basic household tasks. Worth a listen if you’re into bleak lolz!

I also read the third installment of Knausgaard but will save you all my takes unless I’m really blown away by something. Here’s to more joy, more time, more energy in this space as we keep inching through winter!

in gratitude,

lisa

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