What If the Box You’re Looking for Doesn’t Exist?

A few months ago, I was looking through job postings and realized I had about twelve tabs open. There was an operations role, something in governance, a position at a university, another involving communication, and a few others that probably made very little sense next to each other. This was not unusual for me. If someone had looked over my shoulder, they might have assumed I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. The funny thing was I thought I did. The problem wasn't that I couldn't describe the work I wanted. I could describe it all day. I just couldn't tell you what to type into the search bar to find it.

My education probably reflects this better than anything. I studied psychology because human behavior fascinated me, then business because I wanted to understand organizations and strategy. Years later, I went back to school for information security and digital forensics. My work history isn't much easier to summarize. I have worked in higher education, marketing, customer service, healthcare operations, and web design. Along the way I became interested in policy, governance, mediation, communication, and several other subjects that seemed perfectly connected in my head.

For a long time, I interpreted my education and work history as a lack of direction. I thought there must be a career somewhere that would pull everything together if I searched long enough. I looked at professions, graduate programs, certifications, industries, and job descriptions. More than once, I found something that seemed perfect until I looked closely at what the person actually did every day and realized I was interested in a small piece of the job rather than the job itself.

After a while, I started wondering whether I was looking for the wrong thing. Instead of searching for the title that would somehow explain all of my interests, I started paying more attention to the work I had already done. A résumé organizes your life by employer, title, and date because that is how résumés work. It doesn't show the less obvious patterns particularly well. Mine doesn't show that I am usually the person who starts documenting something because the existing instructions are confusing, or how much I enjoy taking a process apart to understand why it keeps creating the same problem. It certainly doesn't have a section for "will spend an unreasonable amount of time finding the exact wording for something because the almost-right wording is bothering her." Yet those tendencies have followed me through jobs that, on paper, have very little to do with one another.

I think this is one of the limitations of the way we talk about careers. Job titles are useful shorthand. If someone tells me they are an accountant, I have a general idea of what they do without requiring them to explain their working life over dinner. A title tells you what someone is doing now. It doesn't necessarily tell you what else they could do, or which parts of that work they would carry with them somewhere completely different.

There is also something reassuring about an established career path. The instructions already exist. If you want to become a particular thing, you can usually find someone willing to tell you what degree you need, what experience employers expect, which certifications matter, and what the next step should be. I like instructions. I am very good at accumulating qualifications when someone gives me a list of them. For a while, I think I believed enough education would eventually solve the question for me. If I learned enough, one day all of my interests would arrange themselves neatly and reveal the career I had apparently been preparing for the entire time.

This was not a particularly economical theory.

I don't regret my education. Psychology changed the way I understand people. Business changed the way I think about organizations and decisions. Even studying information security gave me ways of thinking about risk, systems, and unintended consequences that I still use. Eventually, though, I had to admit that I wasn't missing one final qualification that would suddenly explain what I was supposed to do. I already had plenty of pieces. I just kept assuming they weren't supposed to belong to the same puzzle.

That is, somewhat unexpectedly, how PRÉSENCE began. I wasn't sitting at my desk trying to invent a new profession. I was thinking about communication, first impressions, perception, psychology, strategy, and the gap that sometimes exists between what a person intends and what somebody else experiences. Instead of deciding which existing career they belonged to, I started thinking about what I could do if I brought them together.

The concept itself felt surprisingly natural. Building everything around it has been another matter entirely. I have learned far more than I ever expected to know about domains, self-hosted fonts, booking systems, privacy policies, payment processing, website deployment, and all the tiny decisions hiding behind something that looks simple when it is finished. And that was only one small part of building it. There have also been plenty of moments when I have created a problem for myself purely because I wanted to understand how to do something rather than use the easiest available option. Apparently that is another pattern that has followed me around.

What I like about PRÉSENCE is that it doesn't require me to pretend those previous parts of my life were detours. I don't have to decide which one was the "right" path and which ones were mistakes. They gave me different ways of looking at the same kinds of problems.

That doesn't mean every collection of interests needs to become a business or that everyone should reject conventional career paths. I have interests that should remain interests. Not everything you enjoy needs to become something productive or profitable. Some things are worth doing simply because you enjoy them. Sometimes there is already a profession that fits beautifully, and sometimes a job is simply a job rather than an expression of every part of who you are. Please don't quit your job because a PRÉSENCE Journal article told you to. That would be a tremendous amount of responsibility for both of us.

But there is value in noticing what keeps showing up before deciding that your experience is scattered. The clues might be in the problems people repeatedly bring to you, the part of every job you somehow end up taking ownership of, or the work you continue thinking about when everyone else has already moved on. Those things don't always come with impressive names, but they can tell you quite a lot about where you fit.

I still don't have a neat answer when someone asks what kind of job I want. I can give them several titles that come close, depending on the context, but none of them completely explains it. I spent a long time assuming that if I couldn't find the right box, I needed to keep looking. It never occurred to me that the box might be the least interesting part.

A Question to Consider

What keeps showing up, no matter where you go?