Resuming the Résumé

Since in recent days I’ve gotten a few writing leads that look promising, I spent a couple of hours updating my resume. Yes, for some reason, even if you’re up for a freelance job these days, some people still want to see a resume. I guess it’s proof that you’re not an illegal alien or didn’t just get sprung from twenty or thirty years in maximum security for mowing down your former coworkers.

Anyway…I dusted it off, polished it up…added that weak little line at the top that sums up what I’ve been doing professionally for the past two years (actually more like eight months) - writing for the web and that’s about it…and took a good hard look at the page.

Damn. Whoever that person was before that weak little first line at the top, I wish I could hire her. She’s a whiz-bang go-getter, that one, skilled in juggling multiple priorities and executing this and managing that. Proficient in a world of software programs and competent in—

Wait a minute, I thought. I’m still that same person. I didn’t undergo a personality transplant. I still have all relevant lobes of my brain intact. All right, my memory isn’t what it used to be and some of my chops have gone a little slack, and after having survived my twelve-step program (for recovering workaholics) I’m no longer willing to stress myself out to the point of bodily harm to make a deadline, but I’m still that same basic person.

And I’m proud of what I’ve done.

There have been a few zigs and a couple of zags as the volatile field of commercial design evolved, but I did what I could to stay marketable and make a living. Too bad it doesn’t say what happened between those pumped up verbs. That at some jobs I used to have fun. I liked some of my coworkers and even a couple of bosses. That even in my early thirties, laid off from a job, I saw that my psyche needed a break from the field in order to spend more time and energy at my fledgling avocation - writing fiction – so I took a position that was less challenging but left me brain space to write. And then, when I grew bored with that (actually I was growing bored with it about the same time as the company went belly-up) I went back to something more challenging.

And challenged myself right into disability.

But every one of those entries – even the empty spaces and the weak lines - has a novel or two (or three) in it.

And I’m glad I waited until my thirties to start writing them. Perhaps if I knew I wanted to be a writer earlier, and got my degree in writing in college, and went to those fancy seminars like Iowa or Breadloaf, I wouldn’t be the same person who’d made the same mistakes and took the same risks and had the same joys and sorrows. In short, the stuff that makes good writing.

And now my weak little top line is looking stronger. Or at least it will once I fix the typo. Damn. The whiz-bang manager-coordinator-executor-software-operator would have found that one.

But it doesn’t matter as much as it used to.