“That’s all it ever is”
Stop worrying you’re faking it, keep making it up
At CMU, industrial design majors take a basics course in communication design/typography. It’s called Visual Communication Fundamentals and it’s taught by a young woman and designer. In class this week we had to prepare résumés (there’s a job fair coming up), and we met with her one-on-one to critique them.
Rachel: “You might want to bump the size here, or use a more contrasting weight to emphasize the position”
Rachel: “The whole thing should be really easily scannable; often interviewers don’t have a lot of time to look over résumés beforehand. It’s more important than the date, these are all recent.”
Me: “Yeah. Does the format work? I just had 4 things I was proud of so I figured I’d summarize them instead of listing ‘skills, activities’ etc.”
Rachel: “I think so. And some of these positions are pretty impressive”
Rachel: “UX team, founder/director—”
Me: “Yeah but that one’s just something I made up with my friends, we decided we wanted to do plays and we did them—”
Rachel: “Don’t say it’s just made up. I made up my career, and it’s f*kin awesome. It’s all made up, that’s all it ever is.”
I didn’t know why that resonated with me so much, but it did. I thought about it for a couple of days, and I think it’s because it was a stroke of empathy along with some teachy-wisdom. She was saying “yeah, I’ve been there, just keep going.”
If you’re like me, sometimes you feel like you’re faking it, all of it—but you’re not. You’re doing it. Just because it doesn’t feel right yet doesn’t mean you’re faking. Sure, if you think about your job (school is a job you pay for thatsupposedly pays off later) and you hate it, you’re disgusted, you see no future, then quit. Find a new job. But! If you’re queasy because you feel like you’re not good enough at what you’re doing, because you look at your work and someone else’s and the gulf seems too broad to breach, keep going. As long as you can find it within yourself to do that you’ll get somewhere.
Because you’re making it up. Not faking. Making. And that’s all it ever is.
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