So, I put together a resume for a thing recently. (By the time you read this, either it will have happened, or I’ll know that it’s not happening; either way, I’ll probably be okay with not calling it “a thing” anymore, but right now as I type this, it’s best to be vague so as to not jinx anything.) It’s always a strange, sobering experience putting together a resume, in large part because… well, they always feel like they tell an entirely different story than my lived experience.
That’s not an admission that I’m lying on a resume, I quickly want to point out. The discovery that my old university has no records of my MA degree because information from that period was lost due to an accident, and knowing that I have no copy of that degree after moving countries, made me almost take that off the resume because I was so self-conscious about the idea that I couldn’t back up a claim; that’s how awkward I am about the idea of making sure everything on my resume is factual and honest.
What I mean, though, is that resumes seem sequential and ordered in a way that life just isn’t, in my experience: the story it tells is that you did this thing, and that automatically led to the next, and then the next. You learned skills in such a way that feels intentional and purposeful in an attempt to get to some imaginary next level, or new position career-wise, whereas the reality is that things just happened and suddenly you’d picked up all these abilities because you needed to, just to do the thing in the first place.
Putting a resume together feels as if you’re looking at an alternate version of yourself: one that’s more purposeful and filled with intent. One who knows what they’re doing at all times, as opposed to the me typing these words, blundering from one situation to the next with good intentions. What would it be like to be them, I think to myself when I look at my own resume. What would it even be like to talk to them?