Let Freedom Ring

I'm humbled (and astonished, frankly) by the responses I've received to my worst cover letter ever. Obviously, my frustrations with that particular albatross of modern life are not mine alone. Of course, summing oneself up is a necessary evil: on a date, on an interview, meeting potential roommates, social occasions small and large. People persist in asking where you went to college, what you do for money, where you grew up. If you're anything like me, these questions make you squirm, make you feel small, make you feel hopelessly inadequate to the task of telling it like it is with courage and detail and conviction. Because it's exhausting, difficult work. The teeth-grinding truth of it is that we'd all like to simply be seen. We'd all like to skip the small talk.

How many times I've stared at the hateful blank screen pulled up next to my resume and groaned at the burdensome, insanity-producing task of reducing my life and my experiences to sanitized, acceptable language. How often I've hated the final product of these attempts, no matter how polished and good-on-paper, and wished I could say "I'm writing this in two-day underwear and unwashed hair. I have 96 cents in my bank account and cavities I can't afford to fill. Please want me. Please pay me. Please see me. Please don't make me explain."

And yet. Here we are. We must do these things to survive.

But I'm never going to write another boring cover letter ever again. It's a waste of my time, my talent, my energy. I'm not going to do it anymore. If I must sell myself (and oh I must) I'm going to do it in a way that honors my style, my verve, my guts and blood and beating heart and dirty laundry, my unique way of seeing the world and my place in it. I don't want to be employed by anyone who would turn away from the sheer honesty I'll place before them.

So it is my hope that, in addition to being a place where I can write about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and yoga and the quest for the perfect eyeliner, this blog can be a place where I can help others take the leap that I took yesterday. I took that beautiful awful cover letter and I hacked and I reduced and I polished and I sent it off for better or for worse.

And my heart goes out to those like me, those who look at the lump sum of their experiences and their hard-fought, won-with-tears-and-sweat history and despair at the idea of expressing it all in 500 words to a faceless entity, those who get palpitations and clammy hands at the thought of reducing themselves to cliches in the name of making a buck, amongst a sea, a flood, a fucking tidal wave of other poor slobs all trying to do the same. My heart goes out to those reading those cover letters and those personal essays and those blurbs (and I have been one of those) whose eyes are blurred by the awful tedium of sentence after sentence of boilerplate, boring, hackneyed pap that's been wrung dry of anything resembling a coherent message. Fearful language, sloppy language, safe language.

 Because those readers are longing for someone who can tell the truth about themselves with clarity, with spunk, with some spark of life, someone who sends a tingle down the spine, makes them sit up, punch the air, scream "Yes! Finally! Here she is!"  Because those readers will fight for people like that. They'll open up that resume and they'll take on that history and they'll make damn sure it's seen.

So please, if you have a cover letter you hate for a job you'd love to have, send it my way. We'll get those imperfect, rambling, glittering, desperate drafts a place in the sun, a moment in time to just be.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of words yearning to breathe free. I'll see you. And then we'll go to work. And then together, we'll make our mealy-mouthed bullshit into something that shines like a goddamn crazy diamond.