One of the oddest parts of my job as a public librarian is destroying books. It's a truth of the library world that in a back room off the staff area is a grimy, dystopian set-up where books that have not circulated in years ferment in a large bin alongside books ruined at the beach, dropped in toilet, and covered in pet vomit. Discarded from circulation, they wait until some hapless volunteer (or staff member channeling aggression) rips them into pieces. You can literally do this to weak-bound books, or old novels with cracked spines. Other books-- usually the older ones, with the pages sewn to the binding-- need the pages separated with a boxcutter. These can be recycled, and either drop in chunks or flutter quietly into the designated box.
Recently, while preparing for our building to close before construction of a brand-new library, we were asked to rid the collection of everything that was either torn or had food and water damage that might attract vermin during storage. So I sat myself down with some late nineties and early 2000s bestsellers, and fell into a kind of rhythm. Open book, insert boxcutter. Slice through front endpapers, flip to back endpapers. Glance at the author photo (grainy and pre-digital), read the blurb, slice back endpapers and toss the contents.
After a couple of hours of this, popping an Advil for a baby case of carpal tunnel, I'd come to a startling realization: more than half of the authors were Ivy League. It seemed weird at first, but after an entire bin of Harvards, Princetons, and Yales (with the occasional Brown and one Sarah Lawrence), I realized exactly how many of these people came not just from privilege, but from uber-privilege. (I've got white privilege. It's undeniable, and I would never try. But this was like cashmere blanket, ivory piano keys privilege. Lexus privilege. Never filled out the FAFSA, never worked while taking classes, spring breaks on islands privilege. The kind of privilege that has never seen the little Hamburger Helper hand and wondered why the hand has a nose.)
Never mind that this was just one random box of books pulled for a bunch of random defects. Never mind that there was all the methodology of a car crash in the rhyme and reason for these books ending up in my hands. Nope: fuck all that, in fact, because this is where my brain always wants to go with this kind of information: These are the people who can write books. These are the people who can get published. These are the people taking a sabbatical from jobs at fancy universities, or from start-ups where they made enough to pause for a while and live off the fat. These are people married to engineers who make more than enough on one salary for the other spouse to pursue unpaid artistic self-improvement.
Like the metabolic chain of events in my gut that follows eating a Butterfinger, I feel very good about this train of thought until I feel very, very bad. How can I ignore all the folks I follow on Twitter who have managed to grind it out and do something full-time and still publish? Some of them are raising children, too. Some care for elderly parents. But box of library discards or no, this is always my thought process when I think about how much I'd like to be writing and publishing rather than maintaining secure and gainful employment. I swing from the highs of finger-pointing to the lows of self-reproach. The finger always ends up jabbed straight back into my own chest. Dreams deferred? You. Are. The. Problem.
On the one hand, it's kind of a gross, disgusting impulse to try and find reasons why we can't live our dreams when we still find time to eat cereal out of the box while watching The Walking Dead. (Hi. I did that. It was me. It was yesterday.) On the other hand, I don't Netflix and Chex during the working day. This is the reward for my reptile brain, which is the only part of my brain still online after 8 hours of work, a trip to the pharmacy, 35 minutes of tears over 5th grade homework (both of us were crying) and a half-assed annotated bibliography cranked out for my grad school class.
I do still write. It's just kind of haphazard and unscheduled and occurs in fits and starts. Sometimes I "write" on receipts in my purse because I never think to bring a notebook anywhere. Sometimes I push my lunch break 5-10 minutes, knowing I can blame traffic, because I've got a hot idea I know I'll forget by quitting time. Sometimes I "write" while driving and talking into my iPhone Voice Memo app because time alone in the car is strangely fruitful, creatively. The act of moving towards one thing inserts this pocket of space that creates something else entirely.
I don't know if I'll ever actually publish a book. It might be that when I die, my kids will be buried in an avalanche of Target receipts and business cards with so many nonsensical half-paragraphs that they question whether they ever knew me at all. But maybe I'll make it onto a shelf some day. Maybe some people will pay to read what I've written, crammed into a full-time life, and find hope for their own part-time wishes. And one day, when a harried mom with Cheeto fingers ruins the library copy of the very book I managed to crank out, a daydreaming library employee with literary dreams of her own will savagely bisect my face with a boxcutter and assume that the grinning bitch in the ugly-ass photograph was probably married to money.
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