“You have NO resumé.”

The memory just flooded back to me as I drove down the West Side Highway. Or not so much flooded. More like sneak-attack haunted-house-level *jumped out* at me.

Truthfully I don’t remember if the words exactly were you have nothing on your resumé or you don’t even have a resumé or what. But the gist of the conversation was: why the hell should anyone want you to do anything other than what you’re doing right now. You don’t have enough that IMPRESSES ME.

These words, said by a marketing manager at a former job, stunned me. I was too shocked and thrown off to give a good, confident response – and, tbh, probably wasn’t even confident enough at the time to think one up even if I’d been less shocked by the moment.

~

I noticed today that my face seems softer than it has in a while. Not to the touch, but to the eye. I’m getting the kind of rest I need, and when I go hard for a few days I’m able to block off time to recover. I have a stronger flexibility-structure balance than I’ve ever had before, which means a lot of location autonomy and scheduling freedom, which also means a fraction of the traffic time I’ve ever experienced in my life. This is a very, very privileged position I find myself in. But I know it’s not forever, and I REALLY know it doesn’t come unearned. I also know that the softness reflects something else: a radical self-acceptance and self-curiosity that I’ve worked decades to develop.

I’m 32 now – an age that has always felt special to me. I can’t give you a tangible reason why, other than the fact that I took a lot of “What Age Are You” online quizzes in high school and always got 32, both confirming the fact that I was an older person in a younger body and that I didn’t belong amongst my peers.

The bigger reason, online quizzes aside, is that in my gut I’ve felt that something big will happen this year. I don’t know what and I don’t know when, but just having that objective gut feeling makes me walk with my eyes a little wider and my senses a little higher on alert. I’m looking for opportunities. I’m looking for the magic. I don’t want to miss it.

32 reminds me that I’ve lived my life thus far making the next-right-choice for me at the time, whatever that time was. And so when that marketing manager told me in her office that I Had No Resume, I felt a wave of shame and massive self-doubt.

In hindsight, I can see certain truths about her behavior outside of that room that suggested there was a lot more going on under the surface than I was aware of. I’m a writer, and a professional one at that, and one of my main rules is to never write about someone else’s experience as fact when all it really is is my assumption and interpretation. But on my end: in that moment and the following days after, I played a flip-book in my mind of all the things I’d done until that moment. Had they been a waste? Did I really have nothing to my name?

~

I might be able to rest well now and eschew traffic for the most part. But this is the Now, not the Forever. I know I have a lot of living to do, and this is merely where I’m supposed to be in this moment. This is a 1/3-of-the-way chapter, not the foreward or the intro or the first gripping pages that set the stage. Because in my life so far, I’ve played SO many parts, literally and figuratively. Rizzo in Grease. Frederika in A Little Night Music (she was 14, I was 21 ::shrugs::). A Parisian model. A broken woman. A personal assistant, a studio manager, a fitness instructor, an editor, an actress, a session singer, a ghostwriter, an insurance broker’s middle-(wo)man, a store clerk, a juice sales maven, a yoga-mat-cleaner, a professional sit-in-hours-of-traffic-and-drive-things-across-town-er, and about 12 other things I won’t name here but had me doing everything from other people’s laundry and hearing their deepest fears to creating little fairy and mermaid dolls out of things you can find at Michaels’ craft stores (*my first entrepreneurial venture as an adult, btw. the company was called Fairy Blossoms).

Point being, these are all things that have made me into who I am today and led me to where I am right now. I did what I needed to do to feel the way I wanted to feel. Not everything I did was impressive. But it’s all a part of my story.

Just like relationships. How many relationships, flings, infatuations have we all been a part of that didn’t pan out? Does that mean they didn’t matter? Hell no. Not every-one is supposed to be *THE* One or *A* One, and that’s wonderful. Because through our relationships, flings, and infatuations, with people or otherwise, we get the opportunity to learn way more about ourselves than we knew before. We get to practice conflict resolution, and reexamine the way we view Love. We get to dig and uncover what is healthy and what is toxic. And then we GET TO DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN AND LEARN MORE. And sometimes some of us reach a point where the only natural next step of learning can only happen alongside one other person, and sometimes some of us want to always be learning alongside multiple people, and sometimes some of us go where the wind takes us, and all those choices are valid and beautiful and way way a-okay. The point is, it’s our decisions and our next-right-steps that get us there, and help us make the choices that are the rightest rights for us in our journey of Becoming.

You do not need your story to be impressive to anyone else in order for it to be impressive. You don’t need everyone to be able to see each and every step you take in order for you to climb the staircase. All those steps and all those little-but-huge moments are what build you into a person. Anyone can be a human. A Person has consciousness and conscience-ness and agency. A Person has a Self.

And so, to that marketing manager who told me I Have No Resumé, I apologize if you misunderstood my motives. I am building things bigger than what’s obviously linear. I can do hard things and I will do even harder things because I’ve trekked through the forest and never forgotten how the trees made me feel. I don’t live to impress you. I live to become Me.

Well, here I am. Watch me.