Cleaning the Mirror: The Evolution of a Resume and the Person Attached to It
I have spent an inane number of hours and days on my resume and cover letter in execution of my next transition.
Above all things, I intended for this experience to be a radical expungement of all the fear and insecurities I have felt about claiming the professional aspect of myself. I have spent a lifetime prior to this month googling sample resumes on the internet. Their unrelentingly pretentious, catchphrase-y rhetoric actually made me want to kill myself, every single time. Believing that that was how the fuck people are supposed to write resumes, I slogged through my own CV's. All my past resumes were to varying degrees, embarrassing, compensating representations of myself. They were pretty much the equivalents of those dating profiles wrought with cliches like "laid back, openminded, loves to travel." I sent them out cringing on behalf of whoever had to read them.
It dawned on me that there's no reason to stay in this leeching frequency. How cleansing would it be to absolutely refuse to overuse cliches and catchphrases? A personal boundary between myself and complacency. I fucking love these kinds of linguistic challenges. I live on Thesaurus dot com. I swore on my death bed that I would not use the words "dynamic," "multi-tasking" "qualified" or "diversified" to describe myself. In fact, I have such complicated, negative associations with the word "qualified" used by all of us liberals to desperately sum up Hillary Clinton's ultimately hollow run for office and the political chaos that ensued that I don't see myself being able to use that word for anything, ever again. I limited my use of the word "experienced" to one time. In fact, I even managed to avoid overusing boatloads new age philosophical spiritual jargon because that is a very real tendency of mine. Although, I realize that that's a very subjective statement. I said "overuse."
The massive pool of words, metaphors idioms that I did use to unfurl the mosaic of my love for teaching are still ripe and succulent with meaning. They pulse. They are like fresh produce at the farmers market.
Even if your "most current resume" is not in circulation because you're not looking for a new job, it still holds an energetic vibration that is omnipresently linked to you and it affects you no matter how far in the back of your mind you push it while you're going about your daily life.
I feel like I just cast a magic spell and I am officially out of the garbage zone. I feel like I just served the divorce papers on my old self (the "dynamic, experienced, qualified, diversified multi-tasker") and I can finally start dating my real self. I feel like pouring my 2018 resume and cover letter onto paper was like our first date and I like what I see and I finally feel like we match.