Broad generalization:  one of the first thoughts triggered by  finding oneself amongst the unemployed is some form of “I suppose I need to update my resume.”  

Another broad generalization:   the older one gets, the more just the thought of putting one’s resume together becomes a trigger for a reflection upon the unfolding of one’s life.

Of course, everyone will have their own idiosyncratic kind of reflection, tempered by one’s particular circumstances, such as having a family to support as opposed to being single without any dependents.  

Some people’s reflection will be minimal, they will be more inclined to focus on the task at hand: get a job as quickly as possible.  The resume is a tool is help one achieve the desired employment (career) outcome.  Others, seeing their years and decades reduced to titles, and bullet points, will tend to be more indulgent of the impulse to reflect on just how is it that one has gotten to be where one is and just where one is heading.

I suppose a significance difference between people and their response to facing a resume is just how much they can mentally and emotionally compartmentalize their “work history” from their personal history.  The years from 2003 to 2007 when one’s “primary duties and responsibilities as manager included….” is not associated with that awful break-up with a significant other in 2006.  

Personally, I don’t see how anyone could disassociate the work life with the rest of one’s life.  The reflex reaction of personal psychological association test, except instead of thinking of the first word that comes to mind when one hears another word, one is experiencing the first impression that comes to mind when sees a particular time and place in one’s life.

It doesn’t take having to update one’s resume to trigger such an experience. Probably there is for everybody at least one time each day when someone or something triggers a memory from one’s past.  Yet for most people (who have one or more jobs) the day-to-day tasks and demands tend to make these reflections, whether mundane or profound, whether positive or negative or bittersweet, of short duration.       

For those who are unemployed and seeking to find a job, however, their job becomes doing what they can to sell themselves to prospective employers.  In other words, their job is to focused their attention on developing and presenting that resume to other people.   And not just any people, but people who will read and judge that resume, who will evaluate whether the life they see on paper (or their computer screen) is worthy of further consideration.

[For those applying to larger companies, there is the added layer of potentially having a computer software program make the initial evaluation for further consideration.  Although given the (dysfunctional) objective approach of some Human Resource personnel, the software approach is not that much different than what has been traditionally done.]

[The further consideration is, of course, another way of saying one is allowed to come enter the interview process, which is a whole another emotional ball of wax.]

In such a situation, a critical difference between people is just how inclined they are to spend the mental and emotional energy on evaluating and judging even when there isn’t the specter of a HR Director pondering one’s resume looming in the forefront of one’s mind.  For those inclined to make judging one’s own life a kind of daily priority, tossing the resume development process into the mix is adding gasoline to the fire.  Especially for those who evaluations have a tendency to be on the self-reproach side of the fence.

There is a critical mass point in which the mental resume breaks out of the established time frame and takes in the whole sweep of one‘s life.  All the choices, traumas, triumphs, and tribulations popping up (out of sequence) in a stream of bittersweet nostalgia (an individual’s particular ratio between the bitter to the sweet critical ).  

There is a line from the film Ulysses’ Gaze that I come back to from time to time: the old man says to the character played Harvey Keitel, “In the beginning God created the journey.  Then he created doubt and nostalgia.”

Alongside the resume-inspired nostalgia is the gaze forward toward the unknown.  Most of us get the notion that we can’t fully predict the future.  But the day-to-day routines can usually get us to a place where the unknown future on the horizon is, if it isn’t going to be pretty much the same as it is now (which itself can be a depressing thought for some), has some chance of being better than it is now.  

Standing in the unemployment line, with no “real prospects” on the horizon can be quite the unsettling (if not terrifying) phenomenon.  The impulse to delve into the full scope of one’s life already lived can be, in part, driven by the comfort of the past, even when the nostalgia is more bitter than sweet.  The nostalgia is the bright shiny object to distract the attention.  

It becomes even more bright and more shiny if the notion emerges that if one delves enough into one’s past, one can find at least clues as to how to proceed forward.  That somehow the doubt, while never completely gone, can be reduced to a whisper.  

Standing from the vantage of point R in the trajectory of one‘s narrative, one can see in the movement from Point A to Point B to Point E to Point L to point R something that will say what point S will be, or should be.  That is if one can avoid the regrets about that choice at point H and the injustice of how things played out at Point M.

As some may have already imagined, I am currently in such a resume-induced mental swirl.  If I had to reduce it some pithy term for those who might inquire as to “how’s the job search going?”, I would say I was in place of ‘working it out.”  What “it” is exactly is some kind nostalgic delving that at least in part an investigative attempt to find some indication as to which way I should go.  It is a kind of stalemate, but one that is far from quiet.

There are many ways one can wrestle with such stalemates.  Talking with friends and family, or to a therapist or a counselor, is a common approach.  Then there is wrestling with it in on one’s own.  One can also write about it, blog about it.  Or blog about wrestling with it on one’s own.

One of ways that I have found I am inclined to think about it is what I would call the Spalding  Gray approach.  The details of this approach will have to wait for the next blog, but the general gist of this approach is to imagine you have to give a 90 minute autobiographical rant during which you are seated at a table upon the stage.  You have before you on the table a microphone and a boom box.  Behind you is a screen upon which you can project a few selected images to make your points.

One more key detail that needs to be considered: the audience.  They have come to theater to not only become enlightened, but also to be entertained in some fashion. And they will bring with them all the varying expectations and distraction and moods.  There may even be a few HR Directors in the seats beyond the proscenium.