Scrubbing the metadata from my 12th portfolio revision feels like trying to erase a fingerprint at a crime scene, though the only victim here is my own sense of authenticity. I am currently staring at a job description that asks for 12 years of experience in a software framework that has only been out for 2 years. It is a logical impossibility, a temporal paradox that would make a physicist weep, yet here I am, typing the words ‘expert proficiency’ with a straight face. The blue light from the monitor is hitting my glasses at a 42-degree angle, and I can see the reflection of my own tired eyes. I wonder if the hiring manager, sitting in an office 52 miles away, realizes that we are both participating in a high-stakes theatrical production. We are actors who have forgotten we are wearing costumes.

The Art of Light and Shadow Curation

As a museum lighting designer, I spend my days manipulating how people see things. If I place a narrow-beam spotlight at a 22-degree angle above a chipped marble bust from the 2nd century, the shadows fill in the cracks. The viewer doesn’t see the erosion; they see the ‘character.’ We do the same with our careers. We angle the light to hide the 2-year gap where we did nothing but watch documentaries about cults and eat cereal out of a box. We highlight the one project that didn’t fail, conveniently forgetting the 82 smaller disasters that led up to it. It’s not lying, we tell ourselves. It’s ‘curation.’

But then there is the machine. The Applicant Tracking System is a blind god that demands its tithe in keywords. It doesn’t care about the texture of your soul or the way you handled that crisis in 2012 when the server room flooded. It only wants to see the word ‘Optimization’ appear at least 12 times in your document. I’ve found myself hiding white text-keywords-in the margins of a PDF just to get a human being to look at my name. It is a digital prayer to an indifferent deity. And yet, after all that optimization, after the 52 hours of tailoring and the $112 spent on a professional headshot where I look like a slightly more successful version of my own ghost, the job usually goes to the CEO’s nephew. He’s 22, he doesn’t know what a pivot table is, and his résumé is a single page of typos. But he exists in the physical world, not the digital one.

The Evidence of Survival

There is a fundamental dishonesty in how we vet human potential. We treat a three-page document as if it were a DNA sequence, a definitive map of what a person can do. In reality, it’s just a list of the things we survived. I think about the people who actually value the grit of a situation rather than the polish of the presentation. In legal circles, for instance, there is a necessity to look past the narrative to the hard evidence of impact. When someone is injured or a life is derailed, you don’t care if the person helping you has ‘synergy’ on their CV. You care if they can win. This is where a suffolk county injury lawyer operates-in the realm of what actually happened, rather than the fiction of how it was reported. They deal with the consequences of reality, while the rest of us are busy formatting our margins to 1.2 inches.

I once spent 62 minutes explaining to a junior recruiter why my ‘unconventional path’ was actually an asset. She looked at me with the vacant stare of someone who had already decided I didn’t fit the template. The template is the enemy of the extraordinary. If you follow the template, you are replaceable. If you are replaceable, you are safe. But safety is a boring way to build a company. We have created a system that filters for compliance rather than competence. We want people who can follow the rules of a broken game, and then we act surprised when our companies lack innovation. It’s like hiring a chef based on how well they can describe a tomato rather than how they sharpen their knives.

The Hidden Lexicon

We both know the terms. We both know the lies. It is a dance of mutual deception.

I keep thinking back to that funeral laugh. The friction between the myth and the man. At work, we are all myths. We are all ‘passionate’ and ‘driven.’ But the most impressive people I’ve ever met are the ones who are willing to admit they are occasionally confused. There is a specific kind of power in saying, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll find out.’ You can’t put that on a résumé because the machine will flag it as a lack of expertise. So we hide our curiosity under a layer of projected certainty. We build these 102-kilobyte monuments to ourselves and hope nobody looks too closely at the foundation.

The Necessity of Shadow

My work in lighting has taught me that absolute brightness is blinding. You need the shadows to see the shape of the object. If a résumé is all highlights, it becomes a flat, white void. There is no depth. There is no story. The most interesting parts of our lives are usually the parts we are told to leave out.

The Value of Wear

I wonder what a ‘used’ résumé would look like. Not a clean, crisp PDF, but a document stained with the coffee of late nights and the tears of frustrations. A document that listed every mistake made and every lesson learned. That would be a document worth reading. It would be a document that actually told the truth about a human being.

Instead, we continue the charade. We update our skills to include the latest buzzwords, even if we only watched a 12-minute YouTube tutorial on the subject. We pretend we are ‘excited’ to join a team that we only researched 52 seconds ago. And on the other side of the screen, the hiring manager pretends they have a ‘rigorous’ selection process while they secretly check if any of the candidates went to the same college as their brother-in-law. It is a cycle of credentialism that serves no one except the platforms that charge us to post the jobs. We are all paying $22 a month for the privilege of being ignored by an algorithm.

Maybe the solution is to lean into the absurdity. If the system is a fiction, why not make it a good one? Why not write a résumé that reads like a picaresque novel? ‘In the year of our Lord 2012, I braved the dragons of the accounting department and emerged with a 12% increase in efficiency.’ At least then we would be entertained while we are being rejected. But we won’t do that. We are too afraid of the silence that follows an ‘unprofessional’ application. We would rather be a boring lie than a vibrant truth.

The Unpublishable Truth

I’ve spent 82% of my professional life trying to fit into boxes that were built by people who didn’t know I existed. I think we all have. We trim our edges and tuck in our stomachs to fit the corporate silhouette. But the light eventually moves. The sun sets on every career, and when the artificial spotlights of the office are turned off, we are left with who we actually are. Not our titles, not our certifications, not our ’12 years of leadership experience.’ Just the person who laughed at a funeral and the person who knows how to make a broken pot look whole. When the fiction finally ends and the stage is empty, what is the one thing you actually know to be true about yourself that you could never, ever put on a piece of paper?