They think we don't care

One of the weird parts of trying to provide service to young adults (I'm a 0-18 focused librarian, so I get to compare a lot) is that young adults, by and large, assume that you don't give a blank about them.  That you're just trying to mess with them, etc.  That you don't respect them, don't worry about them, don't empathize with them.  Whereas the truth is closer, I think, to the fact that we just can't know.

We can't know what they actually want from us, because they're not really well developed yet in identifying and articulating their feelings.  We can't know what they actually need, because we're restrained by a host of considerations (respect for privacy, social norms, legal reasons) from asking them the kind of questions that would let us know what they really need, unless for some reason they get mired in the justice/therapy system at which point their defensiveness is going to shoot through the roof, so getting valid info is scientifically difficult.  I'm pretty clear on how hard it is to get the info about what teens need because when I was a teenager and I got sent to the counselor's office, I lied my butt off.  That's the normal, defensive reaction of a young person in a bad situation - don't let anyone else know how bad it is.

Then I worry too - even when I'm working really hard to include people, there's no reason for teens to be happy about that - if I'm not working hard to include them in something they want to do in the first place.  And there's the ugly circle of it - that if they don't feel included they're not going to open up and tell me what kinds of services they do want.
*sigh*  This morning is brought to you by waking up in a panic and starting to do all sorts of work calls when I'm not working.  And by the letter C and the number 5.

Priorities - grownups have them, I suppose

In order to make it to being a professional librarian, I put in a ton of outside-of-work energy.  Not more than any other struggling young professional I suspect - I volunteered a few hours a week at a local public library, went to grad school half time, read a bunch of listservs, read magazines, interviewed people, went to conferences (1 national, 1 regional, 1 state) and so forth, while working full time over the course of two years.
Then I graduated, and I spent nine months working two part time jobs while job hunting, volunteering at the local library in several roles, and doing a lot of extra work for the library I did work at to build up my experience in my hunt for a professional position.

Now that I've landed a professional position (and I love it!), I'm struggling to realign my priorities.  I work part-time, so my impulse is to constantly invest extra work and energy into my professional position.  It has been gently pointed out to me by my supervisor and coworkers that I need to not work for free for the people I'm also working for for money, or at least to please not do it so much.

So now I need to figure out how I'm going to reinvest all that energy into other areas of my life - whether by starting to develop some kind of non-work professional goal, or working out more, or working on writing more, or... to be honest, the prospect has depressed me a bit, in that "I'm terrified of making decisions" kind of way.

Choosing how to invest your time is a big deal.  I have a lot of time to invest here, since we're talking about almost 40 hours a week of time that are available to me now that weren't available 3 years ago.  (Full time work (40 hrs) + half time school (10 hrs) + volunteering (10 hrs) = 60 hours a week of commitments, on average, in 2004, vs. Half time work (20 hrs) + volunteering (2 hrs) = 22 hours a week of commitments on average going into 2008.)  So far my time has been fruitlessly though enjoyably spent in extra sleep and reading lots of trashy novels.  Also in lolling about with the newspapers in coffeeshops.  And, of course, in doing lots of off-the-job learning to support my new roles on-the-job.  But I've been in a bit of a doldrum trying to figure out how to best use my time over the next year or two.  Any suggestions are much appreciated, even if they're just "lighten up!"