Of Cover Letters and Other Truth Telling

I'm applying for a new job because my current job is like a vampire for my professional self-confidence.  Every shred of skill, ability and attitude I have honed over the past 15 years of my professional career has almost been drained away by the past 160 hours of my work life.  I took this job because it was a timely opportunity and it was something I thought I could learn how to do, but things are not progressing as I had hoped they might.  Thankfully another opportunity came up that's a better fit for me.  And I have to get out before I lose myself in the trees instead of continuing to develop forests.  I'm good at developing forests - and apparently not so good at learning how to groom the trees.  

For me, the hardest part of applying for jobs is the cover letter.  I grew up in a culture of women where you were to be demure, you were to deflect complements, and you were not to speak highly of yourself in any way.  You were not to express your true opinion because "if you don't have something good to say, don't say anything at all."  So unless you were talking about how good the Jell-O salad was, you kept your mouth shut - or you just kept shoveling food in your mouth until it was the appropriate time to get up and help with kitchen cleanup. (I've wondered on more than one occasion if this is not the root cause of many a church-lady's plumpness.) Voluntary kitchen duty for me has more than once involved "mistakenly" disposing of someone else's hot mess of a potluck dish then disavowing all knowledge about where the rest of it might have gone. 

So writing about myself in a way that places my abilities, talents and experience in a positive light has been a difficult task I have had to learn during my last semester of graduate school. I've had to shed my genteel upbringing and learn how to write about myself in ways I'm not used to.  It has helped me to put myself in the shoes of my mentors, to think about the things they would say about me and my work.  It has also helped me to let go of the control I feel like I need to have over every word I write.  The letters that have won me the interest of prospective employers have been the ones I've fired off quickly, where I've written eloquently about my passions, and the ones where I've treated my abilities and talents with (Yikes!) the most honesty.  


I still shed complements.  I still deflect glory - but only because I work with other women who can only take credit indirectly.  They're also the ones who make the best potluck dishes.  And every Southern woman worth her salt knows that silence is actually the best complement you can give a cook during any meal.  The other one is not refusing to take home leftovers. 

Beef - It's What's Making Me Sick

Beef - It's What's for Dinner.  This is a familiar ad I grew up with - this triggers all kinds of happy memories from grilling out to the theme song from Rogers and Hammerstein's Rodeo.  I was raised on the gold standard of beef - grass fed.  Twice a year, my Dad would scope out a prime specimen among the hundreds of unknowing bovine candidates in our pastures to become our dinner for the next six months.  He'd carefully select the best one out there, load it up in the trailer and roll off to the butcher 80 miles away.  A few days later, we'd pack empty coolers in the back of the Suburban and bring Bessie back to the deep freeze as steaks, roasts, ribs and ground beef.  

Because I was raised on such lusciously wonderful beef, I haven't been particularly impressed by the grocery store's efforts at what they call beef.  This has apparently been a lucky stroke for me.  Several years ago, I had a student who was diagnosed with a beef sensitivity, along with sensitivity to tons of other crazy things like olives.  She was a high achieving student, but reached new heights after she quit eating beef.  A couple of years later, my Mom's skin rash that had been diagnosed as Lupus and subsequently as a Latex/Lanolin allergy was so bad she changed doctors.  She was diagnosed with all kinds of crazy food allergies, including beef, watermelon and Brazil nuts.  She never eats Brazil nuts, so cutting those out was obviously not a problem - the other two were.  But after she quit eating foods she was sensitive to, her skin rash totally disappeared after plaguing her for constantly for more than 10 years. It was when my sister-in-law was diagnosed with similar crazy allergies, including a sensitivity to grapes, that I started to pay attention to my own reactions to foods I eat.  

My culprits:  almonds, soy, fruit whose juice is red, melon/squash, and...you probably saw this coming...beef. I went to the hippie grocery store last weekend (as opposed to the regular folks grocery store with lower prices and *gasp* corn fed beef) specifically to buy the good stuff.  I made this super-licious spaghetti with meat sauce to store away for lunch this week.  I've been eating it like gangbusters because of just how yummy it is.  I've been increasingly indescribably uncomfortable, and I've lost sleep because I've had acid in my mouth all night.  Then last night, I had a pretty wonderful grass-fed burger at a party along with several tums.  I think it was about halfway through the fireworks that a light bulb came on over my head that the Beef was making me sick.  I hadn't eaten any of those other foods in weeks because I'm very careful about not eating them.  It had to be the beef.  

So - this discovery doesn't really help me today.  In a few minutes, I'm off to get antacids to get me through until the Prilosec kicks in.  I've already had as much allergy medicine as I can have and stay awake for work today.  So, goodbye grass fed drips of grease down my happy hamburger eating chin, goodbye chunk of savory Sunday pot roast, goodbye to the sizzle of Ruth's Chris steakhouse, and goodbye spaghetti with super-licious meat sauce - we had a good run.  Now to find an allergist to get official confirmation of my own crazy food allergies. And more Tums.

Shalom – Stillness of Spirit

“Cease striving (in some translations – be still) 

and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10 

Wholeness.  When you’re whole, there is a sense of “cease striving” that allows you to truly experience acceptance and affirmation that only God can provide.  Without wholeness, you strive for it constantly – some unseen reality, a standard too high, an undefined nirvana.  Even if you’re the achiever-type and who can visualize exactly what success will look like, what your 3, 6 and 12-month plans are to get closer to that, achievement is not always what it’s cracked up to be. 

Especially for achiever-types, and I know this because I am one, achievements only open the door to other things you need to do to get to the next level of achievement.  I started graduate school in 2000, and just graduated in May with my Ph.D.  As if writing a dissertation and getting it approved wasn’t enough, my advisor is adamant about having publications come from it, which truly is a wise thing.  Then the other mentors on my committee are also after me to present my findings at conferences. Another wise thing. But these things only lead to more work, which leads inevitably to more work.  It’s like I’m always a step away – as if I’m walking up the wrong-way escalator.  Each time I get up a step to the top, another appears.  My lack of excitement at my graduation has mystified some of the people I work with.  I should be excited about this achievement.  But one achievement’s children become the next stairs on the escalator that leads only to new stairs. It’s quite a tail-chasing way to live. 

 In the middle of all of this, I’ve been dealing with some very important identity issues related to how I will choose to live the rest of my life.  I have friends for whom the search for a husband is the most important part of their lives right now.  I have other friends for whom getting rid of their husbands (or wives) is the most important thing they have ever done for themselves.  Some of my friends spend all of their mental and emotional energy investing in their children or taking care of their aging parents.  I don’t have any of those things in my life right now, so sometimes their stories are just entertaining rather than instructive for me, and sometimes they just make me feel bad for the storyteller.  It makes me perversely glad that I’m not in those shoes.

I feel most whole when dealing in the land of ideas, concepts and translation of those ideas into the lives of others.  Maybe I don’t need a romantic relationship to feel whole, don’t need a family of my own, don’t need to invest my life in those kinds of things.  Maybe ideas are all I need.  I have questioned for years whether the romance/marriage thing was something I really wanted or whether it was a social norm that I didn't want to conform to.  I even considered very seriously becoming Catholic so I could become a nun.  That's a pretty serious statement coming from a Baptist girl.

Maybe I’ve been looking at the wholeness thing all wrong.  What if instead of achieving in order to be whole, Shalom comes for me through simplicity, through stripping down what’s not necessary, through becoming poor in spirit.  And poor might not mean having nothing, but having only what's most important.  It may come particularly for me through peeling away layers of ideas and experience to get down to what I really need – to feel accepted even with my own flaws, with my own createdness in all its uniqueness including being at home in the land of ideas and big high sounding words.  And only God truly provides that kind of stillness, that all-inclusive wholeness, that depth of affirmation.  I feel myself wanting to jump off that escalator all of a sudden. Maybe someday I will.