Is this the year you stop doing it for your resume?

You're allowed to make decisions that strictly make you happy.

It’s approaching the 1-year mark since I left my job, and things are going swimmingly.

Which is to say: it’s 11am on a Monday and I’m sprawled on the floor of my parent’s guest bedroom, wearing Hello Kitty pajama bottoms purchased two decades ago, chomping on re-heated pizza from two days ago, and scouring substitute teaching positions in the greater Philadelphia area.

My writing career has really taken off.

In any case, the process to become an educator for our nation’s leaders of tomorrow was curious in many ways. Delightful — given how little bureaucracy there was — and horrifying —given there was precisely zero bureaucracy at all. The line items of my resume must have really impressed the screening committee!

Though I should probably clarify.

These “line items” weren’t inked on my actual resume. They were etched, in my thumbs. After precisely 30 seconds of fingerprinting, I was deemed a highly qualified substitute teacher.

Given — I am not, in fact, a registered sex offender in the state of Pennsylvania.

My parents are very proud :)

But before learning that a proper resume wasn’t actually required to become a substitute teacher, I had already gone through the effort of updating mine. And as I read through my resume, for the first time in a long time, I reflected on our relationship — a toxic romance, with too much history.

It was 2020, when I first realized that something was awry. My relationship with my resume didn’t feel like a loving partnership. In fact, it was making all the decisions for my life. My time had become its property, and my days no longer felt like mine. I began to wonder: was I writing my resume all these years, or was it writing me? Only one way to find out, I suppose.

And when it comes to relationships, communication is key.

Sweet sugarplum, dearest butterbiscuit, beloved Resume of mine.

Oh, how you’ve always whispered sweet nothings in my ear! And oh, how the message in those sweet nothings rang out — loud and clear!

A message that said: if I merely climb to the next rung, scale the next mountain, put in more hours, and pick up more responsibility — the promised land will be delivered. Life happiness, guaranteed!

But see, there’s just one problem: I’ve been following your lead for a while now, and something just doesn’t add up. The quality of my resume is hunky-dory. But the quality of my life? Not so much.

So, my darling jellybean. My gentle love-muffin. My sweetpea, saved in PDF.

Dearest Resume — a humble question, I present:

For how long, exactly, do you intend to dictate everything that I do?

And for how long, will I keep tolerating your nonsense?

When our work ethic becomes our pergatory

Now, don’t get me wrong — your resume is important.

It undoubtedly grants flexibility.

So there’s no shame in wanting to up-level your career. No shame in going after great opportunities. No shame in wanting to make more money. And no shame in valuing achievement.

Allow me to reiterate: you are not a doomed soul that’s ~sold-out to capitalism~, merely for having big goals, or craving excellence. Especially when so many people tap out, before even entering the arena of “hard things.”

But friend — I had the inverse problem.

I didn’t avoid the arena. I lived in it. My own work ethic refused to let me leave. And somewhere along the way, I started to take work “ethic,” a bit too literally.

My work ethic conditioned me into a rigid moral framework: working hard is “good,” and taking it easy is “bad.” So my resume was no longer just reflecting my career — it was judging my humanity.

Soon, I lost all ability to work less without feeling painfully guilty.

It’s fine to work fiercely for specified windows of time towards something that you want to achieve. That’s called: going after a dream!

But that’s very different from sprinting without a concrete goal clear in mind — and by default, constantly.

Are we working fiercely for something specific? Or do we just not know how to give ourselves permission to work less without feeling guilty?

That’s when our “superpower” to move with focus and urgency, starts to look more like indentured servitude. And, we miss the true cost incurred, beneath all that resiliency.

Sometimes, our capacity for grit, warps our emotional gauge. The feeling of fatigue becomes so hardwired into our nervous system, that it becomes our baseline of “normalcy.”

Which of course, then makes it hard to even answer a simple question about how you’re feeling each day, truthfully.

Is this what happy looks like?

And can I even judge that objectively?

3 Tips to break free from your toxic resume relationship

At no point did I consciously decide — Yup, I think I’ll devote my life to endlessly elevating my resume! Instead, it was more like:

"After this week, things should slow down a bit!”

Oh sweet-twenty-something, Sabra! So precious. So impressionable. So green.

That was the message that I told myself, and perhaps, the message I genuinely believed. I was a girl with no boundaries. A girl with no self-control. And if my resume could text, I’d reply to every 2AM message. U up? wyd?

Working myself at all hours. A booty-call to my CV.

Dear friend — if any of this sounds even slightly familiar — perhaps it’s time we set some ground rules in this toxic relationship? But before we get into all of that, we need to believe that it’s worthy to experiment with change.

Step 1, and perhaps the hardest step of all: suspend your disbelief.

Step #1: Suspend your disbelief — pretend you know nothing about what makes you happy, and open your mind to new techniques

When I was making those crazy daily sacrifices in service of my career, I wasn’t actually being a masochist.

In fact, I was probably making pretty rational decisions, based on what I knew worked well for me. Productivity didn’t just protect me from guilt; it was also inherently satisfying. And so even as I felt piercing headaches of exhaustion at the end of each day, I also felt a rewarding sense of completion.

In fact, I got so much satisfaction from getting shit done, that I didn’t think any other way of operating could compete. Working hard is my “happy.”

It’s just in my nature. It’s just how I’ll always be.

So again — I wasn’t a masochist. It’s sorta-kinda-logic-y?

I distrusted that working less, would make me feel net-net better. Other happiness techniques would never equally satisfy. Which totally makes sense— when other techniques are never tried.

Logic! See what I mean?

I didn’t test other ways of generating satisfaction, because I was incapable of suspending my disbelief:

Maybe, I don’t know myself as well I think I do? Maybe, I need to reset on what I think I know, about making myself happy?

It’s an uncomfortable thought, because we all think we’re self-aware.

But humor me for a bit.

Let's just for a moment, pretend that we don’t get happiness from productivity, and start fresh in the search for feel-good ingredients. And that’s not to discredit the fact that productivity feels good. Productivity absolutely fuels deep fulfillment. But it’s not the only, input out there. Suspend that belief.

And instead, soak-in the following:

Is it possible that there other ways of living that could work for us? And make us feel more at peace than ceaseless productivity? And if so, what way of living? What daily techniques?

Well, funny you should ask.

To step 2 — we proceed.

Step #2: Notice and disrupt your patterns — scrutinize “chaos” and deliberately choose peace

In case you don’t believe me, I’ll briefly reiterate: I did not wake up one morning, brush my teeth and proudly proclaim to my bathroom mirror with a battle cry, and a — Hoorah! — let’s work 16 hours per day, for 10 years straight!

We can easily spot something bad, when the implications are all declared upfront. But when the byproduct of small decisions accumulates gradually, massive impact slips by, quietly overlooked.

It took me years to realize how much I “chose chaos” each day, in small ways.

And while my line of work may not have been particularly conducive to easily choosing peace, the daily decision not to — well, that was all me, baby.

The “chaos” that I chose was staying up until 2am iterating through 30 versions of a board deck. It was troubleshooting a breakage for 8 hours, and rather than deferring my backlog of work, just powering through — as though I didn’t already work a full workday. It was picking up every ball that I saw dropped, rather than allowing myself to leave it on the ground. Or, like a mature leader, delegate.

Point being: the problem wasn’t that I chose chaos. But rather: the fact that I chose it like clockwork, unconsciously.

A brief confession to my former co-workers: I’ve probably fired off more than one Slack message to you, while parked on a toilet seat.

By calling chaos what it is, and recognizing that only you can choose it — you become aware of your option space.

Labeling “chaos” daily lets you assess it from a place of logic, rather than a place that’s involuntary and robotic.

What actually needs to get done today? And what’s just being driven by my guilty conscience?

It took me years to trust choosing peace, as a happiness technique. But that still doesn’t mean that you need to always choose it. The point is to identify chaos when it comes knocking at your door. And when it does, call it out.

Like, literally — to your ceiling.

Like a crazy person to your ceiling — announce what you’re choosing. Right now, I’m accepting this chaos! Or — Stay back deamon! I choose peace!

It’s cheeky, but it also needs to be. When your default behavior has been viking levels of brute force for years, dislodging it requires goofy technique.

And if you go through that exercise daily, and find yourself repeatedly chanting something to your ceiling that you don’t like the sound of— maybe do the uncomfortable thing tomorrow.

Maybe friend, choose peace.

Step #3: Reframe what you’re building — pick the lifestyle you want, before you pick the career

At some point in the last 10 years, I forgot the point of a resume. And that’s this: the point of your resume is to get you to a place where you can spend less time giving a shit about your resume.

Instead of thinking of our resume as a tool, we sometimes treat it like relic.

Something that we never want to disrupt or tarnish. Something to keep perfectly pristine. But when we endlessly “spruce and shine” our resume for bigger and better opportunities, we risk giving it too much authority.

Achievement isn’t the goal —rather, it’s the key.

It should be used to open doors to a lifestyle that feels good — whatever flexibility that we value most, and can actually experience, in our daily routine.

Do you want a life that can be highly mobile, or a life ingrained in one place? Do you want a daily life that involves talking to lots of people, or one with as little human interaction as possible? Do you want to surround yourself with lavish things that bring you delight, or would you find more delight in as few working hours as possible?

Ask yourself these hard questions. Make harder tradeoffs. And then anchor on them ruthlessly. Moving towards a tight criteria of flexibility that matters most to you, is foundational to happiness.

From there, you can back out the next career from the lifestyle that you want. And you need to trust something:

You will not regret choosing the lifestyle that you want, first and foremost, before choosing the title or the career.

So, let’s do ourselves a solid, and let the following statement really sink in:

Remember friend — you are allowed make decisions strictly for you.

You are allowed to make decisions that don’t always serve your resume.

Conclusion

The old Sabra would have never allowed herself to become a substitute teacher. She lived in far too much fear of disrupting her track record, even if she delighted in the flexibility.

But if I had to choose where my greatest achievement to date lives on my resume, it feels like it’s written right here. In this time that I won’t try to justify to my next employer. In this time time, that I finally allowed myself to enjoy.

My greatest personal triumph — the thing that I’m the most proud of in my life — currently lives in my resume’s blank space.

And you don’t need to quit your job, to do that. You can merely start by auditing your days. And with that, I’ll leave you with a few final questions, dear friend.

Is 2025 the year?

The year where you get funky, and mix it up? The year where you give yourself permission, to break-up with your old ways?

Is it finally time, dear friend, to stop living your life for that resume?