I am not afraid of words.

I actually love words. They don’t scare me at all. Even the ones that are meant to scare me, like “tortured,” “blood-curdling,” and “zombie” don’t scare me. So it took me a while to figure out why writing my resume was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. Every time I sat down to tackle it, I felt like I was looking into the eye of a dragon while holding a broken sword. Everything within me wanted to run away screaming.

The thing is, my resume is basically a breakdown of my work experience and job skills. And looking at it from that perspective is not very scary. It’s not supremely encouraging, but it is certainly not dragon-like. My problem is that in my head, my resume looks something like this:

“Hi, my name is Anne Marie. A long time ago, I finished college and got a science degree, and I was really proud of myself, and then I got a job I loved for a company I loved. It was a fun job, it was mentally challenging, it was in my chosen field, and I was surrounded by scientists and people with Really Big Brains. I was good at it, too. I worked really hard and got promoted within about a year and was starting to envision a career path for myself at this company. And then one day my husband decided that we should move to Ohio because he needed to pursue an employment opportunity that would allow him to develop job skills that would one day provide for our family, and like a dumbass, I believed him. So I followed his dreams to a farmland in the middle of nowhere and the only job I could find out there that was remotely related to my degree was in landscaping, so I did that. And then I became a mom and then we moved back to California and then my husband still couldn’t provide for our family because he really didn’t want to pursue the type of work he had done in Ohio after all so I took an online course and started working at night and never sleeping because I was working and taking care of the kids, and still the idiot couldn’t find a way to make enough money for me to quit my job so I kept doing it and eventually I left him because he was mean and scary on top of being stupid and now I am a single mom and it has been nearly a decade since I’ve done the kind of work I want to do but I’m not so sure that I’m really excited about it any more because now I’m a mom and I want to be home with my kids but I have to do this because I have to provide for these kids on my own and I hope I can make enough money to at least afford a small apartment but even that scares me because it costs about $80,000 a month to rent a small apartment in the Bay Area and I'm scared of small apartments in the first place because I have a dog. So anyway, I really need a job, even though my resume makes me look like I have no brains and no career drive. Won’t you please hire me?”

See, those words tell a story, and that story scares me. A lot.

But most of that story was not in the resume, so maybe the process of writing it isn't so scary after all. I still think it has great big teeth and breathes fire, though.