Your Job(s) vs. Your Identity

For those of you who have multiple jobs in multiple places listed on your résumés, I thought you might enjoy this passage from Gregg Levoy’s Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life.

At a party, I once overheard a stranger ask my twin brother, Ross, the requisite introductory question, “So what do you do?” After a brief silence, Ross replied, “When?”

I don’t believe he meant to be smug, merely honest, and in that one-word answer he recited the challenge of polydox: accepting that we are many things, not one…; we try to “get ourselves together,” to answer the question “Who am I?” when really the question might be better put, “Who am we?”

Too bad Levoy’s perspective isn’t shared by everyone in HR. Might make job-hunting easier for some folks.