I would rather shovel all manner of feces than write a resume.

This afternoon I had the pleasure of chatting briefly with the lovely and talented Bakerina.  My cell rang at the library where I am attempting to make a list of every job I have ever had (twelve in the past nine years), and every "extracurricular" activity I have participated in during that same time period.  (Way more than a dozen; it runs the gamut from being the secretary of a group called The Lavender Menace to teaching an after school gardening class to fourth graders in Texas.) 

When asked how that process was going, I replied with the title to this post.  She giggled and made me promise to put the phrase on a screen posthaste. 

The near and dear among my readers already know that I am in the process of applying to finish my bachelors degree after five years out of school.  When I went to college the first time, I was seventeen, and had already been out of high school for two years, a quasi runaway paying my own tuition at an unschooling cooperative. 

Unschooling cooperative, what's that, you ask?  Well, specifically, it is this, but generally, it is an institution based on the idea that learning occurs best when a student is not coerced.  In such a place, there are no requirements, no grades.  Everyone puts together a portfolio of their self initiated projects.  Teachers offer some classes, and facilitate a lot of independent studies.  I spent my time reading about the agricultural revolution and ancient goddess worship, studying ecological systems, volunteering at a rural produce farm and an urban gardening program, trying to learn to read ancient Greek, taking pictures and sequestering myself in the darkroom for eight hours at a time, running meetings, planning conferences, sitting on committees, learning to cook.  All this in three days a week, the other four I worked at a greenhouse, making minimum wage to pay above mentioned tuition.  I did pay it myself, the whole thing. 

When I broke my foot I went back to work and school after two weeks rather than the doctor recommended six because I would have missed a payment otherwise.  Such a rush meant the bone never quite healed.  It stress fractures even now.  A young couple ran the bagel stand at the Amtrak station where I had long layovers in both directions.  They took pity on me and gave me their bags of day olds most mornings.  The days I did eat lunch, it consisted mostly of those bagels.

I was pretty impressed with myself those two years.  When my parents failed to support me, I supported my goddamn self.  I got what I wanted from life through pure willpower and charisma, spinning my abandonment into steely self-reliance.  I dared the world to try and stop me.

No one else in my life was quite so impressed with me, though.  My father never tired of mocking my beloved new school, belittling my life.  About the only thing that garnered any respect was the fact that I was holding down a job, eventually even getting five and ten cent raises.  He'd been telling me for years by then that I would never be employable unsedated. 

Acquaintance’s eyes glazed over when I tried to tell them how exited I was about this utopia.  They sometimes laughed in my face that I took this hippy school so seriously.  "So, basically, you do nothing all day?"   My friends stopped speaking to me, I guess partly because I wasn't around, but also because we all changed.  They started doing cocaine; I had to worry about getting to work on time.  Not that I regret not cultivating a raging addiction, but I never did get to be a teenager.  The other kids at the new school, too, wanted nothing to do with me.  I was a neurotic overachiever. And then there was this kid.

My beloved unschooling cooperative broke my heart by being imperfect.  In rebellion, I applied to an academically rigorous liberal arts college my second year, a school where gifted younger scholars might begin their collegiate life at sixteen, seventeen, sometimes fifteen.  Soon after the application was mailed, I forgot about it, immersed as I was by that time in my West Philadelphia anarchist collective life.  The little kids I taught to garden those two summers soaked up my knowledge, but my love, too, like greedy little sponges.  I made real friends; I even slept with a woman who called me her girlfriend.  It was the happiest I'd ever been, I wanted to stay.  When the acceptance letter came, though, it brought the opportunity to be taken seriously.  If I was going to work myself to the limit of my physical and intellectual capabilities, I wanted not to be laughed at.  I could not resist the siren song of academic prestige.

My arrival in the Berkshires was marred by fear I was behind after not just two years of hippy school, but three preceding years of frequent expulsions.  I started classes riddled with guilt that I was making the less revolutionary choice, that I was abandoning the independent radical self I was so proud of having constructed.  I was back at the financial mercy of my parents.  My father never missed an opportunity to mention how expensive tuition was.  He mentions it even now, brought it up during the most recent of my increasingly rare trips to his house.

First semester promised a glorious academic career. In many ways, college was everything I wanted school to be since I was small.  Students took classes on whatever weird thing was interesting to them, and there was so much to be interested in.  I studied The History of Number.  I read Plato and Hamlet.  I stayed up late talking about the meaning of it all, what it would take to save the humanity from itself.  I organized committees, I planned protests, I wrote papers and turned out to still be that smart girl who taught herself to read at four years old.

Second semester, who knows what happened, I got cocky, signed up for classes that were too hard.  My friends loved me and believed in me, I finally felt safe after not being able to afford to cry for so many years.  I don't know, maybe it was the birth control.  They say orthotricyclin exacerbates depression in women prone to it.  In any case, there was a slow implosion, months of time now lost to my memory.  I'm told I didn’t get out of bed for most of the spring.  Spent an ineffectual and expensive (just ask my father) month in a moderately famous mental institution.

There is more, it continues to be weird.  I limped through a second year at school before dropping out to do a cross country documentary project.  The next five years saw me in Texas, Chicago and Ohio, supporting myself doing interesting jobs and taking the occasional college class on architecture or literature or what have you.

On good days, I look at my life and I’m pleased, even proud.  I managed to avoid every single cliché right of passage, but I’ve had more adventures than most anyone I know, and nobody lands on their feet with such panache. I feel different from people my age, even the ones I adore and admire.  They seem afraid of failure, of loosing their dignity. Circumstances have exhausted their power to degrade me.

All of my carefully constructed self acceptance crumbles in the face of needing to take an inventory of my achievements.  Turn the charm up to eleven and I can land me any old job, no problem, but these admissions councilors want a more thorough soul bearing.  The questions they ask are designed for kids with six fewer years of age, and at least ten fewer years of living.  The impressive parts of my story don’t fit into their boxes, the places I must leave blank stare back at me.  My unconventional choices look like failures on their forms. So, I make my own list and format it the way I want to, but I can’t shake the fear that it looks like a series of disasters authored by an unrepentant nutjob. 

Comments

[Bakerina]

Oh, my dear, where to begin? I could write a CD-ROM's worth of praise for this post, and for you, but in the interest of brevity, I will not. I will simply say that this is gorgeous, and leave it at that.

Well, not quite. I will leave it at that after a couple of observations:

1. I know that it's not cool to rank on other people's parents; you can rank on your own parents, your friends can rank on their parents, but the twain shall meet at your peril. Nevertheless, I'll go out on a limb: your father's fixation with the price tags on your education and mental health makes me angry. He should be thanking his Maker every day that in the great family lottery, he and your mom were lucky enough to get you and your sister. If I ever have a daughter who has even a tenth of your bravery and moxie, I will be consider myself the luckiest mom in the universe.

2. As much as I hate hoary old cliches, I will fall back on them when the alternative is to see my dear friends beating themselves up. Here we go: It's not you, it's the whole resume process. No matter what you do, there is something wrong with it. You have had a gloriously eclectic and adventurous life, but on paper it looks to you like "a series of disasters written by an unrepentant nutjob." (Incidentally, you need to write a story around that title, and then send it to McSweeney's. Dave Eggers will fall at your feet.) The thing is, no matter what you've done or how well you did it and how much skill you've built up, it never looks right on paper. If you've had a lot of jobs, you're afraid that you look flaky. If you spent twenty years working for the company that hired you fresh out of high school, you're afraid that your work experience is too limited, and you have a narrow skill set. If you change jobs once every two years, it looks like you can't stay in one place. If you stay 5, 7 or 10 years at each company you work for, does that indicate a resistance to change? And Bog forbid if you take some time off to travel, or take non-credit college courses, or (gasp) find yourself on unemployment for any reason. On paper, it always looks less than ideal, even if the candidates, and eventual workers, are absolute gold. It sucks, it really does. Fortunately, we are worth more than the sum of our jobs on paper, and a good employer will realize this.

Besides you were a secretary for the Lavender Menace! Who wouldn't want to hire you on spot after learning that? :)

['mouse]

If it was me offering advice, (and it is), I'd say all you need to do is clean this post up just a little teeny bit, print it out, staple it to the form of any institution worth attending and write "see attached." It not only covers the jobs and extracurriculars, but it could serve as the writing sample (tho I'd recommend the Texas road crew entry for that).

Like I say, you are a shoe-in at any institution worth attending.

['mouse]

shoo-in. Darn it. I knew it was wrong the minute I hit "post."

[InterstellarLass]

Sounds to me like you've been through the 'school of life' and back. This post is definitely a resume of it's own. Who says the format has to be exact...

[yellojkt]

This is the second time this week I have run across the "unschooling cooperative" concept. It sounds a little like Montesorri for people past puberty. It also sounds like a dumping ground for kids the system can't handle but can't incarcerate.

Life experience is worth hundreds of "leadership in extracirricular activities" which are just fairly lame attempts to model real life in a fish bowl. Can't be done.

[Pearl]

Now where'd ja go? Knock, knock? You about?