The Unresuméable Life

Round pegs and square holes

This is an older piece that no one wanted to publish. Their loss is your gain!

Enjoy!

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I am 31 years old.
I have built nothing.
I have done nothing.
I am a waste of space.

These thoughts ran through my head on a loop. I was paralyzed as I sat down to write a resumé, the first one I’ve ever had to write in my life. Yep, the very first one.

You’re lazy and too far behind.

I needed a resumé for a national writing competition. They wanted a complete ‘professional picture’ containing both writing and nonwriting experience.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

When I was little I fell in love with movies and television. I thought I would be the next Jim Carrey or Whoopi Goldberg or Robin Williams, actors I idolized. Once I turned 18, I left home to pursue that dream.

Not long after that I discovered a love of writing.

Since then I’ve pursued a full-time creative career.

That pursuit has led to a spotty ‘professional picture.’

To put it mildly.

Idiot.

Nothing looks good when I finally wordvomit onto the page. This resumé is shaping up to be loose, hot garbage.

To begin with, I have a theatre degree from a state school. It’s not even a Bachelor of Arts. It’s a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies, which is the equivalent of saying I have a degree in picking my nose.

Since college, I’ve scraped together a living however I could. That work history includes:

• Waiter

• Fitness instructor

• Realtor (for a literal 3 months)

• Dog walker

• Segway tour guide

• Personal assistant

• Funeral singer

• Wedding singer

• Ordained minister

• Mall elf (I wish that was a euphemism)

My Jim-Whoopi-Robin dream has had occasional success with painfully long dry spells. I’ve had a few lines on a few TV shows, been in a few movies. For the last three four(ish) years I’ve run a blog that’s amassed about a hundred subscribers. All in all, it’s not where I thought I would be at 31.

Failure.

I stare at the lackluster resumé before me. It is cold, hard, and unfeeling. This single-page document is evidence that, over the course of 31 years, I have failed to become productive, useful, or successful.

At anything.

At all.

But…surely that can’t be true.

I know I’ve done and learned some amazing things.

I know it.

I once slept in a bubble tent on the side of a Swiss mountain. In college I passed off a 10-minute improvised monologue as something I’d spent all semester perfecting. I’ve got Oprah-level emotional intelligence.

In Italy, I ate handmade gnocchi on the edge of a cliff. I can adapt to any situation and can talk to almost anyone. In 3 years, I’ve published over 100,000 words. I can talk in front of a crowd. Hell. I can sing in front of a crowd.

I once flew to Chicago on a whim and didn’t tell anyone. I can make people laugh and I explain things well. I swam with turtles in the waters of Mexico. Last year I self-published a book (it sold 26 copies). I’ve driven across the country by myself. I’m a good friend and a good listener.

How does all of that amount to “failure?”

That’s when it hits me —

It doesn’t.

I struggle to write a resumé because I’ve lived an unresuméable life.

I haven’t been a cheetah pursuing its prey; I’ve been a hummingbird sipping on whatever nectar seems sweetest that day. I’ve spent the last 31 years excavating the world for any and every lesson it’ll teach me.

This has led to big, bold, messy choices - choices that have granted me a mountain of experience and a backpack of skills that can’t be translated onto a tidy 8x11 piece of paper.

And that’s okay.

Perhaps I don’t need to fix my life. Perhaps I just need to fix the story I tell about my life.

Moving forward, whenever I head down that all-too-familiar ‘failure’ spiral, I will stop and ask myself –

“Would I really trade the life I’ve lived for a more resuméable one? Would I cash in all my adventures for a perfect Education-Work History-Skills existence? Would any part of me be happy with that?”

I suspect that my hummingbird brain will scream a resounding ‘No’ to those questions and then move on to the next adventure. And maybe, just maybe, if I do that enough times, I’ll be able to look back one day onto a very full, very chaotic, unresuméable life.

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