New Directions

What a year 2009 turned out to be! After graduation and the emotional high of sending out resumes and beginning to interview for professional positions, my carefully planned new career seemed to careen out of control. After returning from a Serials Librarian Conference in Phoenix where I was presented a student award, I had more than usual difficulty recovering from the fatigue of the trip.

It is time to mention I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and Post-Polio Syndrome in 1992. However, by 1994 I had come to grips with my condition and began taking a proactive approach to adjusting to both conditions. Some of the adjustments required to keep me alive and functioning were unspeakably difficult and painful--like the dissolution of a twenty year marriage. Supporting an indolent husband and being responsible for the well-being of two children virtually on my own had become increasingly stressful and debilitating--not to mention trying to convince myself and everyone else that I was not really having trouble working two or three jobs and dealing with two chronic conditions and two teenagers.  I finally snapped and a nervous breakdown landed me in the "Psych Ward" of a local hospital. There I got help and decided that I could make changes that might allow me to stop looking for miracles and take responsibility for my own happiness and survival.

After a difficult divorce, a change of careers, and a period of living in abject poverty paying legal fees and child support, by 2003 I felt I had my life back under control. In 2004 I had enrolled in a graduate online degree program at UT. My job in the Systems Department of the University of Memphis Libraries was much less stressful than classroom teaching and allowed me to dress as I needed to cope with my MS and still look and act like my colleagues with the exception that I used a mechanized scooter to cover long distances in the library and on campus.

Then we hired a new Dean of Libraries who turned out to be a poor administrator as well as something of a martinet, micro-manager whose sole claim to fame by 2005 was that she had dictatorially decided that all library employees, regardless of job duties, must meet her dress code requirements: no athletic shoes, no denim, no long shirts or tunic tops. We were to dress "business casual." When I objected on the basis that some of us had special needs, I was told that I was "unprofessional." I finally went through the Minority Rights Office and with the required doctors' statements received "special dispensations" to dress in heavy cotton pants, tops that concealed that I also wore diapers, and most necessary of all--prescribed athletic shoes. However, the Dean did everything she could to "punish" me for bringing "my personal problems" into "her library." I found myself under increasing stress as I began to have to work surreptitiously through other people as she tended to oppose or sabotage any idea or project of mine automatically. I learned to appreciate Dilbert cartoons in a more personal sense during this period.

Since much of the work I was doing was that of a Systems Librarian rather than a computer technician, I decided to earn a librarian's degree and look for a position with a more enlightened administration. By graduation in 2008 I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately, the light turned out to be a train headed directly toward me!