On the things that aren't on our résumés

Here is his story: Socially clumsy New York University student, younger than most because he skipped a few terms in grade school, wanders away from a mixer and finds himself in the college newspaper office. “Can you write?” someone gruffs from behind a manual typewriter. He gets his first assignment. He’s hooked.

A generation later, I yearn to be valedictorian or salutatorian of my high school class — not because I care terribly about the honor, but because both the #1 and #2 graduates get to make speeches at commencement. But courses are weighted in calculating GPAs, and art, it turns out, weighs less than advanced physics.

So I land the #3 spot, which does not come with podium time. I simmer and mope for a few weeks, and then I stay up very late one night, hunched on my flowered bedspread, yellow legal pad on my knees, writing the speech I would have liked to deliver.

The speech — which references The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and aspires to the essay-writing gold standard of John Leonard, whose columns I clip weekly from the New York Times — gets published in our suburban newspaper.

I’m hooked.

Crossing the street of memory

When you read these parables from the sunny, retrospective side of the street, they are tales of triumph. In both cases, a young person wound his or her way toward what turned out to be lifelong career satisfaction.

But cross that street of memory to the shadow side. These are also stories of deficit: an undergrad wallflower, too shy to talk to girls; an uber-achieving high schooler who set a mark for herself and missed. They remind me that it’s what we lack (a thirst for high-level science, an innate sense of rhythm), not just the gifts we have, that land us where we are.

I thought about that recently when a friend showed me his résumé. It was bullet-pointed with the skills accrued during a 20-year career in social services, from adjunct graduate-level teaching to budget management. It was an accurate, and impressive, outline of his work life. But I wondered about the tangled underside of that tidy CV: the underling he had to fire; the supervisor who gave him nightmares; the grad students critical of the texts he chose.

Look at this — no, this

We present ourselves in myriad ways: résumés and CVs, sure, but also a torrent of Facebook posts and Instagram photos, all carefully curated to limn the highlights of our lives. But what about the lowlights, the dim and regretful places?

What if you Instagrammed not the Martha-Stewart-worthy antipasto you crafted with radish rosettes and a frisée garnish, but the clotted, eggy mess that was your first pass at omelet-making?

More profoundly, what if you wrote an inverse résumé — a tally not of your proudest accomplishments but of your bleakest, most bumbling, most humbling moments?

I imagine my own:

• Received a “D” on my first project in Art 1 — yes, the course that subsequently dragged down my GPA — and nearly quit the class, until blue-eyed Mr. Bahmerman persuaded me that if I remained in his tutelage, I would learn to see. . .and to draw.
• Ended prom night with raised voices and tears because my date — who turned out to be queer, just like me — had refused to dance. We stayed friends. Years later, he took me to my first gay bar and gave me the first (and only) three cigarettes I’ve ever smoked.
• Suffered anxiety attacks for five harrowing years, attacks so debilitating that I could not eat in restaurants. Five years of nibbling takeout in various parks, making excuses to avoid business lunches. . .and learning a few things about humility, fragility, and self-forgiveness.
• Failed — oh, I’m tempted, still, to hide my face — to tell my best friend something she really ought to have known. Indelible, transfiguring: the moment I learned, like a pail of icy water, how chilling it felt to betray a trust.

I could go on, but don’t the résumé coaches insist on a one-page limit? Surely you get my point, and you have your own bullet-holes in the heart: The friendship that flamed to cinders for inscrutable reasons. The wound that still aches on foggy days. A litany of wrong turns, stumbles, and outright mortifying face-plants.

John Leonard, that columnist I admired back in high school, wrote about his friends: “There are calluses on their experience, which improves the grip.” I knew, even then, that he wasn’t talking about the way his pals handled a tennis racquet. But I didn’t know it was my own blisters I’d come to cherish most.

Experience first, meaning later

I’m not one of those people who believe things happen for a reason. I think they just happen. Reason comes later, in the way we tell the story, the way we hold our misdeeds to the light and make them meaningful.

If we did that more often — all of us, from presidential candidates to the folks next door — would we gradually dismantle that poisonous myth of the self-made woman or man? Crumble forever the fiction of “doing it all”? Appreciate more deeply the ways we depend on each other to ramble through this life?

I’ve been hurt and disappointed, self-absorbed and ashamed. Those unshining moments don’t make me noble. They don’t necessarily make me better. They just make me human — as human as the stranger gabbling on the H bus, the friend in a spasm of grief on my living room couch.

Here’s the other take-home from those fables of failure, mine and my father’s. You can revise: never the past, but always the what-happens-next.

Years after ducking out of that mixer on his two left feet, my dad did learn to dance. I remember it vividly: private lessons in our suburban living room, my mom in stylish heels. There he was, the scrawny kid from Brooklyn, the spot-on sports writer, the college wallflower all grown up, executing a snappy West Coast swing, quietly murmuring time as he twirled my mother across the improbable floor.