The Connective Tissue
If your career looks scattered, you are probably looking at it wrong.
Somebody told me once that my CV did not make sense. They did not mean it unkindly. They meant that the parts did not obviously lead to one another, and that a person reading it quickly might struggle to see the logic.
They were right that it does not read like a ladder. They were wrong that it does not make sense, and the difference between those two things is the most useful thing I have learned about how to describe a working life.
The ladder is a lie we inherited
We were handed a model of a career that goes upward in a straight line, each role a slightly larger version of the last, and any deviation requiring explanation. It suits large institutions, which is presumably why they invented it.
Almost nobody actually lives it. The people I work with have careers that look like a scatter plot — a stint in something completely unrelated, a business that did not work, a sideways move into a field they knew nothing about, a passion that turned commercial without ever being planned. And they apologise for all of it. They open with an apology, in fact: I know it looks like a mess, but…
Stop apologising. The scatter is not the flaw. It is the data.
Looking for the through-line
The parts of your life that look unrelated are almost never unrelated. They are related at a level below job titles, and finding that level is the whole exercise.
Look at the things you have done — all of them, including the ones that felt like detours and the ones that failed — and ask what they have in common. Not in subject matter. In what you were actually doing, underneath.
Were you always translating between two groups who could not understand each other? Always taking something chaotic and giving it a shape? Always finding the people who had been overlooked and making a case for them? Always telling stories, whatever the ostensible job was?
That is the through-line. It runs underneath everything, and once you see it, the scatter plot resolves into something with a direction. Not a ladder. A thread.
Why this belongs in the first moon
Because you cannot stop hiding until you can see what you have been hiding, and most people cannot see it. It is too close. It looks like nothing, because it has been there the whole time.
Finding your through-line is how you find the thing that is worth showing. It is also, usefully, how you stop feeling like a fraud — because the fraud feeling comes from suspecting that your working life is a series of accidents, and the through-line is the proof that it never was.
You have been the same person the whole time. You have just been doing it under a series of different job titles, in a series of different rooms, while quietly assuming that nobody could see the pattern.
They could not. That is why you have to show them.
This is part of our Reclaim Your Wild series. Come back each week for a new article or sign up and get a monthly round up.
