Chapters don't live in the logistics

I’ve been reading the Daevabad trilogy. Like a lot of contemporary fiction it loves a cliffhanger chapter break. A reveal, a twist, some new insight right before the page turns.

We structure our own lives in chapters too. But we break ours in the wrong places. Resumes, how we introduce ourselves at parties, how we narrate our own histories to ourselves. We love to mark the chapters at logistics. Moved cities. Changed jobs. Had a kid. Fiction knows better. Fiction breaks at the revelation, not the relocation.

My own story could be told like this:

• Did QA automation for an online chip marketing company.
• Took a year off to stay home with my son.
• Did a variety of contract programming work.
• Worked as a software engineer for a car company.
• Worked as a software engineer for an AI company.
• Worked as a software engineer for a career company.

This is how my resume looks if I boil it down.

But several critical things happened alongside these which are far more important to my identity.

I took up painting through a daily practice challenge while I stayed home with my son. This rekindled my love of art and pushed me more into design. I ended up involved with an art show in Canada and started joking that I am an international artist. All of this reframed how I see what I do and helped me connect engineering to art.

I haven’t seen myself as an engineer for years. The exposition was a daily challenge I took up just to prove I could. It taught me something about myself. These events are on my resume but the important revelations are not part of a list of skills and responsibilities.

There’s a subtle reality hidden in here too. This transition of mindset has no clear event tied to it. I don’t know when I seriously started seeing myself as an artist. But I know this helped build that shift.

We need time and reflection to see shifts like this in our lives. We can’t always see our best chapters as they are being written. We can only look back and find them later.

Just because the logistics of our lives are clear doesn’t mean they define us. We get to define our own identities with our own revelations.