In October, 2010, I stumbled across my resume folder on my computer. Clearly there is something inherently evil about April, as the last five resume drafts were all created in May.

Over and over, every few years in May (after losing my job-du-jour in April) I would redraft my resume and put my faith into the power of The Job Search to solve my problems and enable me to survive another year. That was honestly about as far as my planning went, because I was usually in crisis mode over how to pay the bills and keep a roof over our head.

So I prayed to the resume gods, trolled the “want ads”, sent out emails and filled out online forms. Everything, and I do mean everything, rested on that resume sparking the flame of gainful employment.

Whatever bad decisions I had made over the previous year, whatever bad luck had befallen us, whatever misplaced hopes I cherished all rode on that damn resume. It was kind of like a house of cards, just without the cards.

On that one small document weighed the whole of my life: shelter, food, clothing, and even my health. One bad accident without money and without health insurance, and I would be below the radar, probably homeless.

I stared at the most recent version, from last May no less, and was overcome with a visceral, angry reaction:

FUCK my resume! I do not want to spend my life chained to my resume, relying on it to save me from ruin. I will not spend another second of my life staring at my resume in despair. I am not going to cling to that sorry document as if it were a life line. It never has saved me, and never will.

In the aftermath of that realization, I was stuck. I’m in grad school, and yes, even with a doctorate to my name I will still need a resume (or, in academic lingo, a “CV” which stands for “curriculum vitae”, which is…a resume). I want to work in this field, I want to have jobs in the profession I am studying so diligently, and to do that I’m going to be sending out my resume. It’s unavoidable.

What IS avoidable, though, is the part where my entire life relies on my resume to survive. That is the part I really hate, not my actual humble resume. It’s not about having to apply for a job, which I can (and will) do; no, it’s about the fact that our fortunes rise or fall based on how well our resume sells that year.

And by fortunes, I mean the rent or mortgage payment. And by rise or fall, I mean whether the check clears or bounces.

I want to apply for a job because I want to work there, not because I’m desperate. It’s a privilege people think is reserved for the wealthy, but as Tim Ferriss points out, being wealthy isn’t about money as much as it is about choice: the ability to choose where we want to work, to decide when we want to take vacation and for how long, to make our own hours. It may look like that you only get those choices when you have money, and in one sense that is absolutely correct. But the key to this puzzle isn’t about being fabulously wealthy, it’s about knowing what you want. It’s deceptively difficult, because most of us know think we know what we want. But we don’t, we just know what we don’t want more often than not.

Which is a whole ‘nother post to write, but my point here is that when I came to this realization, I sat down and figured out what is it, exactly, I needed? What had I been relying on a resume for? Happiness? Personal fulfillment? Hell no. PAYING the BILLS. That’s IT.

So I took a look around at my small apartment and my bills and such, and realized that without my car (which broke down and I did not have the money to fix it, not and pay rent), I did not need more than about $18k/year net, which is $1500/month, to live in peace. The prior few years had become lessons in simplicity by default – being poor will do that to anyone, without the need of a personal guru – and so that was the sum total of what I needed to not be scared. If I could find a way to cover that base then everything else would be gravy. I would be FREE.

Of course I want to do a lot more than just subsist, but for fuck’s sake, subsisting is IMPORTANT.  I know some bloggers talk about taking the risk of walking away from everything and carrying no baggage and trusting in the process, and good for them. Me, I want a roof over my damn head. I want to know that if I walk away, I have some place to come back to. Call me a traditionalist.

I returned to an old idea I failed at before, “multiple revenue streams”. I can and will write a lot more about this (although there are many blogs out there which explain it better than I ever will), but the fact is that in the world today it’s almost a necessity. Having a job is a risky, risky thing to trust your life with (much less the lives of your family members). A quick review of my skill sets showed that I had one: writing. So I returned to my dusty idea of writing erotica stories and selling them, and to writing a blog to help other people gain self-confidence and hope by sharing my own saga of insecurity and woe. That’s why I’m not shy about selling this blog as an income generator for myself, because it really is. If I can clear that $20k/yr mark with my writing skills (which is a fairly modest goal, tbh), then I can do that OTHER stuff without worrying about it. I can do things I enjoy and which are not soul-sucking time wasters (writing this blog, and writing erotica) while still having the time, energy and security to chase those other dreams.

So I challenge you to rethink your resume, or whatever it is you rely on to pay the bills. What do you really need to get by, bare minimum? Where is your safety zone? What else can you possibly do to secure that kind of income without selling out your dreams? Better yet, how can your dreams help you reach that goal?

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