Jen Dzuria is the best. THE BEST. (Seriously, she is for professional advice what Jennifer Peepas at Captain Awkward is for social/personal advice). I devour just about every single thing she writes, these days, and because she’s awesome about self-referencing previous pieces buried in her own archives and other places where she writes, I’m constantly linkhopping older gems.

I spent a good part of yesterday digesting this post, and this morning went back to this one and this one. These three posts, together, say something about class and class mobility and the ambitions of smart women who grew up poor that I think needs to be more on the radar in libraries, because let me tell you, geeky little latchkey girls in hand-me-downs who dreamed their way out in the company of Little Women and Judy Blume and Jean Craighead George, who worked their way through undergrad as waitresses, and then brought their BA’s and their social justice vocabulary and their ink-still-wet divorces back to the library to work their way through grad school as circ clerks  making just above minimum wage are a THING in our profession.

I took Spanish in high school, not because it interested me, but because my grandfather told me that the best career outlook I had was to be a bilingual secretary in a law office in my hometown of Tucson, Arizona.

I married the boy who told me that being a military wife was my best bet for traveling to Europe. We ended up stationed in Virginia, where we spent our entire tour broke and isolated.

I was twenty-eight years old when I got my first credit card. I  was thirty-two the first time I bought a piece of designer clothing. I was thirty-five when I started a retirement fund. No one ever taught me to navigate middle-class social coding; I learned on my own, hard and slow and imperfectly, and the hardest part has been breaking myself out of poverty thinking.

It’s that narrowness of vision, that imposed reality that is the most damaging legacy of devastating poverty. I have a genius-level IQ and ambition to match, and I lost fifteen years of my adult life in just re-learning how to think about my own capabilities and expectations. I never, ever, ever forget that.

That history is part of what makes me good at my job – I’ve been told I have enormous empathy for patrons struggling with difficult life circumstances, and unwavering determination to help them frame the question and track down the answer, and I do – but it’s inseparable from the history that makes self-assessment and self-advocacy hard, and makes personal risk hard, which are traits that do not contribute to success, for me or for my organization. These are traits that I am actively deconstructing and overcoming.

So now when I sit in a job interview or a new professionals social or go to a conference, I’m hyper-aware of this dividing line, the middle-class-born and the middle-class-aspirational. When I sit in a staff meeting and we talk about service priorities and access and cultural competency. As a profession, we’re fierce and relentless, and proud, in our belief that information access and information literacy is the path of self-determination, the path that leads out of poverty, out of stagnation, out of isolation. We wholeheartedly believe in that vision for our patrons.

I wholeheartedly believe in that vision – for us. For ourselves. For the coworkers, students, and interns we’ll mentor along the way, and for the kid in the stacks reading Dead End in Norvelt,  who’s going to be back here in fifteen years asking for a job. I believe that nurturing that culture of self-determination within the profession strengthens us, brings talents and perspectives to the table that are desperately needed to do the work that we need to do with the populations we serve.

Conferences are fun and it’s always great to see friends and come home with some new ideas, but I’ve struggled to find a deeper motivation for professional organization work. The last few days’ pondering has awakened a fire within me.