From assistant librarian to library assistant

At the moment, I work as an assistant librarian. From next Monday, I’m starting a new job as  a library assistant. This means going down the payscale rather a lot, but it also means that I will no longer have to do most of the things that make me unhappy in my current job. I won’t go into all the details of how and why the changes came about – who knows who might read this? – but I will say that I’m very grateful for the support I’ve received from a certain management course leader, my line managers, and of course my lovely and very understanding colleagues, who are still being supportive even though my departure from my current role will mean that they have extra work to do until a replacement assistant librarian is found.

I’m feeling rather guilty about leaving colleagues in the lurch, but I have been told several, if not many times by now, not to feel guilty, so I will try not to! I’m also a bit worried about the change in job  – I’m afraid I’m one of those people who, if they don’t have anything to worry about, will just invent something! I’m worried that I might still feel that I’m rubbish, even when doing a job which is (hopefully) a lot less stressful than the one I’m doing now. As the internal negative voice has always been there my current job is obviously not its sole cause.  So, logically, it won’t just stop when I finish in my current role. However, I do think that the job  has most definitely exacerbated the internal negative voice and its effects, so I’m hoping that my positive/negative balance will start tipping a bit more towards the positive over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, I still have four days of assistant librarianing to go and it seems like all the ‘interesting’ cases are rearing their heads just in time for me to try and sort them out before I leave…