Unraveling Old Patterns of Unworthiness: New Goals for Professional Authenticity
I am due to proliferate greater personal and professional life balance. I am Updating My Resume.
Jesus Christ, what an exercise in facing the reality of my self esteem. It's really time for my confidence in how I present myself professionally to be no different than my self assuredness in other areas of my life. And then hopefully, the places where I am insecure and self-loathing might soon follow.
Resumes and dating profiles are quite similar; same idea, different execution. I actually only realized that yesterday. In the spirit of tooting my own horn, my Plenty of Fish 2009 dating profile was a damn masterpiece to behold. Through it I connected with a ton of very high quality people, several that I am still friends with today. Creating a dating profile was easy because I couldn't give half a fuck about dating. My soul is accounted for. Strictly in this vein, I really didn't feel any pressure to say things I thought people wanted to hear or hide things about myself that I thought others might find undesirable or depict myself in a way that I thought other people wanted to see. I'll never forget the exhilaration and satisfaction I felt at being so unattached to a result that I was able to be so authentic. I am determined to take that magical, satiating feeling and transfer it across my resume writing experience this year.
Professionally, I have been so deeply conditioned to believe that composing a proper resume means telling employers all of this shit that I have been told that I should think that they want to hear. A haze of cliches that have become so diluted and hollow that none of it carries any meaning at all and the actual person behind the CV remains a mystery. I can't even bear to peruse sample resumes on the internet. Every time I read things like "passionate, experienced, dynamic, self-starting critical thinking multi-tasker driven to initiate solution-oriented diverse client relationships," my brain goes numb. Resume catchphrases might have meant something real once upon a time, before they were piled so haphazardly on top of each other in so many desperate, fear-fueled job-seeking situations. They reek of cheap, imitation hand bags, mcmansions and enslavement. I can't make the medicine go down anymore. This is not where I want my frequency to remain. I will keep revising, until my resume is cleansed of empty words or pretentious claims that feel in any way incongruent to my personal truth.
There are parts of my CV where I had to think about whether the shame coming up around them was real or an illusion of shame coming from elsewhere. For example, one line states that I attended some programs for gifted and talented youth when I was 13. A voice inside me was like, "You are 35 years old. What are you trying to prove, by including stuff that you did when you were a child?" Ashamed, I almost removed that line, but ultimately I kept it with renewed conviction, for it is an absolute, that I am able to recognize giftedness in my students-- and every challenge and blessing that comes with that giftedness-- because I had the same quality recognized in me, so long ago. What I was doing when I was 13 completely defines the person and teacher that I am today. It was such a pleasure to arrive at this conclusion after meditating on it.
It is my hope that through mindfully cultivating my 2018 resume, I'll be able to see a clear reflection of my fears from when I last updated it in 2014 and ask myself if each of those fears are even real anymore. I don't think most of them are and I'm looking forward to presenting myself on paper in a manner that reflects the healing of these parts of myself that has manifested over the past 4 years.
May pretense and the inclination to pose fall away and be replaced by the frequency of unwavering self acceptance. In the words of BBC's Merlin, "I am who I am and I am who I was and I am who I will always be."