The Un-Résumé

What I've learned from the things I've subtracted from my life.

Photo by Chris Weiher on Unsplash

A few days ago a young relative reached out for my advice on improving their résumé (note my correct use of accents thanks to my French practice). I hadn’t looked at my own résumé in a while so I pulled it up and as I was looking through all my professional achievements, I started wondering about what a résumé of my entire life would look like.

While there are a lot of things I could put in there about my degrees, my relationships, and all the things I have learned, it struck me that a résumé is a document of accumulation. It is an archive of the knowledge, skills and experiences we have added over the years. But there is no section for what we have had to subtract, no bullet points for the self-limiting beliefs that we have discarded, the old societal scripts that we have rewritten, and bad habits that we have painstakingly shed. And I am beginning to realize that these acts of unlearning are often the most courageous and important things that we ever do.

I'm not talking about small habits. I'm talking about the big, invisible scripts that guide our lives. For years, I believed that to be a man was to be a stoic provider, that a 9 to 5 job was the only path to stability, and that a home you didn't own was a sign of failure. Unlearning these scripts wasn't just about changing my mind; it was about dismantling the very architecture of my worldview to build something new.

Unlearning What It Means to Be Smart

If there is one Tamil Brahmin stereotype, the word that comes to mind is studious. As much as I don’t consider this to be a part of my identity anymore, I can’t deny its influence in shaping me as a person. Growing up, I was always taught to equate academic success to my value in society. Studying and acing exams was something I was great at and somehow I felt this made me more intelligent than those who weren’t great at academics or at acquiring knowledge. I looked down on my classmates who didn’t know about The Fall of Constantinople or about Continental Drift or Special Relativity. But the music stopped the minute I stepped out of the classroom and into my first job.

I quickly found myself struggling to keep up with the things my clients demanded. My manager had to talk to me about how I needed to do more to improve my performance, and for someone who was always praised for his grades and with an immaculate GPA, this was a harsh lesson. But it was also a necessary one, because it forced me to re-think my definition of intelligence and what that meant in my new life. Nobody cared that I could name all of Jupiter’s moons or that I could solve complex differential equations in my head. What mattered was my ability to provide value and solve my clients’ problems. For this, I had to unlearn my habits of relying on past experiences and rebuild my critical thinking muscles. I had to unlearn that a solution was always present somewhere in books or on the internet. Every problem is unique and needs active thinking to solve and that is the true measure of intelligence.

Unlearning the Husband's Default Mode

If you, like me, are a heterosexual man in a heterosexual marriage, you, like me, need to wake up to the fact that you are most likely not pulling your weight in the relationship. Most of us, especially those of us coming from deeply patriarchal societies like India, have a default mode. This default mode centers our identities around being “providers” and women being “nurturers”. Now here’s where you might say, “No Rohit! I’m a feminist! My wife works and I help her out equally! I do the cooking and cleaning as much as she does. There is equitable distribution of labor in our household!”

To this I would say, you are better than a vast majority of men but it’s still not enough. Even if us “progressive” men have learned to cook and clean and don’t have the same expectations from our wives that our parents did, we often still think of it as “helping out”. Helping out implies that the main responsibility of managing the household is still the woman’s and that she is the project manager while we are the minions who do what we are told. But we have to understand that the mental load of managing a household and dividing this labor is significant work in itself.

It’s not enough for me do the things asked because at some point if I don’t proactively get ahead of these and think about what is needed to run the house and our lives, this manager-minion dynamic will continue to build and I will eventually incorrectly resent my wife for being “a nag” while she will correctly resent me for being a lazy bastard. So I have had to unlearn this default model and let me assure you this is a particularly hard thing to do. Every so often I find myself pulled back into this setting and it is especially true when our routines are disrupted.

Unlearning Stoicism

A classic trope of our times is the idea of the stoic man. One who is self reliant, and doesn’t show emotions or articulate his feelings because those are distractions and only hold one back. And I have to say I bought into this for a while because it’s what the men I knew modeled. I grew up assuming that vulnerability was weakness but nothing could be further from the truth.

Being stoic has nothing to do with being invulnerable. We all suffer hurts and emotional pain. The more you push it away or suppress it, the harder life gets. There is a quiet void just beneath the surface that grows into a chasm if left unchecked. Unlearning this default reaction took me long years of therapy and effort. It was painful and is something I still have to consciously fight every day - another consequence of the male default mode. But unlearning this and replacing it with a healthy way of expressing your feelings can improve your life immeasurably.

Clearing the Clutter

You mind is like a cluttered field that is overgrown with weeds. Sometimes you need to take out the weed-whacker and clear the ground. Unlearning is hard, painful and sweaty work that may cause more pain and grief than you thought. Every instinct will tell you to reject what you are doing because you will be throwing away decades of conditioning. But it is the only way to make space to plant something new - something that is authentically you. Go ahead, unlearn something and open yourself up to a magical new life.