Owning Failures on My Résumé

Written by Bethany Suckrow Blog 24 Comments

Editor’s Note: Today’s story comes from Bethany Suckrow, who is a staff writer with Prodigal Magazine. She is one of our favorite writers. We know you will enjoy today’s story!

10 a.m. and I’m just rolling out of bed. It’s my morning off. I work this afternoon at my part-time office job, and I’m blissfully happy that I don’t work at the restaurant again until tomorrow.

Until the phone rings.

It’s my restaurant manager. I don’t trust her any farther than I can throw her, and apparently the feeling is mutual.

She’s called to tell me that I’m fired.

I’ve never been fired before, and it’s a feeling worse than (God forbid) getting a failing grade on an English paper,

because I’ve just flunked real life.

I’ve lost out on an entire paycheck, maybe even several paychecks.

Angry, hot tears well in my eyes as my mind scrolls the rolodex of handy excuses. My boss played favorites, as did the other waitresses. I was the outsider, the one that didn’t come from their hoity-toity, upper-middle class neighborhood. I was the college student working three jobs and trying to earn my degree.

Once I graduated, I was the girl working three jobs and trying to plan my wedding. And then I was the newly-wed commuting 45 minutes for each 4-hour shift, just so that I could get paid to have screaming mothers and their toddlers berate me because they wanted booths instead of tables, soy milk instead of half-in-half.

I was book smart, not restaurant smart.

I was the artsy type, the type that wasn’t great with mental math or memorizing daily specials.

I roll over and look at my husband. He stands at the small mirror tacked to his wall, adjusting his shirt collar before he leaves for work. He’s been working in music retail for two months, and every day before work he gets shaky and nervous, his blood pressure skyrocketing as he faces another day working on commission. All he wants is to provide for us, but if he doesn’t sell a $3,000 keyboard today, he will earn less than minimum wage.

We’re working these hard, ridiculous jobs, and it’s getting us nowhere.

I feel it, this overwhelming pressure :

Make money. Pay your bills. Figure out your career. Find a full-time job. Be a good wife. Write a book. (And don’t get pregnant.)

It took me six months and another waitressing job, but I finally got the point.

If I had just owned my mistakes,

if I had just taken a moment to be embarrassed by my own behavior, if I had just admitted that I made waitressing harder than it needed to be by believing that the work was beneath me, I might have kept the job.

One thing is for sure, we’ll never hear God say that our behavior is contingent on how much slack other people give us.

Thus, I can’t erase those waitressing jobs from my résumé; they keep me humble. Those jobs are a bigger part of my career than I ever planned.

It’s like my mom always used to tell me,

“In order to earn the big things, you have to be faithful in the small things.”

Whether it was schoolwork or house chores or even in my relationships, the wisdom in that has never failed me. Our overall grades depend on our faithfulness and consistency in our everyday effort.

We may hate jobs like retail, food services, manual labor, or nannying, but those stages of our lives are what God has provided in the meantime.

It’s a chapter in a bigger story. It’s the work that God has given you today.

It is your daily bread.

Be thankful. Steward it well.

I’ve known for a long time that God made me a writer. Maybe not for my whole life, but for a good portion of I’ve known that it’s what I do best. Eventually it dawned on me:

Working is a necessity, but working a job we love is a privilege.

We are not entitled.

God will provide the right work at the right time if I just begin.

This is why I started blogging. In the past three years it has helped me exercise my writing muscles and hone my skills. I started by venting about my sucky job situation and all my dreams of being a celebrated writer.

Becoming a writer didn’t start with a best-selling book.

It started with writing.

Through blogging I’ve realized that in small increments, my blog is my writing at work. This has transformed my writing life. It connected me with Ally and Darrel, and now Prodigal Magazine. I couldn’t have predicted that. I certainly didn’t have the confidence to believe that it could happen, but here we are.

It makes me wonder :

What experiences do each of us need to own up to in order to live a better story?
What moments in your life stand out to you, the ones that you wish you could erase from your résumé?
Where do we need to demonstrate faithfulness in order to be the people God has called us to be?

More than likely, those moments feel scary because they hold a significant amount of truth and freedom for us, but we have to humble ourselves enough to admit it.

About The Author

Bethany Suckrow

Full-time writer by day, artist and blogger by night, Bethany Suckrow authors the blog She Writes and Rights, where she shares both prose and poetry related to life, faith, storytelling and creativity. She has just begun her first foray into selling her artwork through an Etsy shop, The Ripe Word . She and her musician husband Matt live in the Chicago suburbs.

http://jonfulk.com/ Jon Fulk

I’ve never been fired because (I’m embarrassed to admit) I’ve always quit before it comes to that. Good for you for sticking in there and learning from it! I love your writing because it’s honest and it’s real. It’s like that line from “Midnight in Paris” spoken by “Hemingway”. It was something like: ”Of course it’s good. It’s good because it’s honest.” Great to read you again
- http://shewritesandrights.blogspot.com Bethany Suckrow
  
  Thank you so much, Jon! Even a small, distant comparison to Hemingway makes me blush.
http://unknownjim.com/ Jim Woods

Wow Bethany, what a great reminder! We do have to eat humble pie (much much more than we would like) to experience life. Fantastic post.
- http://shewritesandrights.blogspot.com Bethany Suckrow
  
  Humble pie is indeed a part of life. So true, Jim! Thanks for reading.
http://www.prodigalmagazine.com/ Ally Vesterfelt

This is such a great story, Bethany, and so beautifully written, as always. Right now I’m learning that the best part about failure is that it gives God an opportunity to show me that my performance does not dictate my value. When I fail, it doesn’t make me less valuable. If I look at it correctly, it gives me an opportunity to step more completely into the woman God made me to be. Thanks for sharing this with us.
- http://shewritesandrights.blogspot.com Bethany Suckrow
  
  That is so true, Ally. The world wants us to believe that when we fail we ARE failures. I beat myself up for weeks about losing this job, convinced that it meant I’d never be hired for a job that I wanted as a result. So thankful that God patiently showed me that it wasn’t the end of the world, and to all the people that continued to believe in me and support me as I looked for something better.
http://KatieAx.blogspot.com/ Katie Axelson

From one writer to another, I understand you frustration. Yet still I understand: being a blogger is being a writer. Sure, it’s not a career and it definitely won’t pay the bills, but it’s the act of getting black words onto a white page. It’s vital.

Katie
- http://shewritesandrights.blogspot.com Bethany Suckrow
  
  So true, Katie. Even better, I think that blogging can be a great addition to your resume, because it’s proof that you can stick with long term projects, and it shows that you’ve found your voice.
http://twitter.com/shalom08 Shalom L

I TOTALLY love this article! In my opinion, you should have not been let go from your job that way – over the phone, and no one should ever be fired that way. There’s something in that way of firing people that is mean but then this is just my opinion.

Your article, by the way, reminds me of my mom when we first immigrated to Canada as a family. Back in our former country, she was a college teacher and a respiratory therapist. When she arrived in Canada, her education and work experience were not recognized by the hospitals here and she ended up working in factory jobs just to make ends meet. This experience made her depressed and, just like you, she felt like she “flunked” in real life. I remember her crying every once in a while, back then, feeling sorry for having failed us. She did, eventually, with God’s grace, she chose to swallow her own pride and went back to school full-time. Last 2009, she found a new passion – taking care of elderly and sick patients as a Nurse’s Aide. She finished the certificate program and got hired by hospital at the east end of the city. She loved it, even though, it wasn’t exactly what she was doing back in her former country. To be honest, seeing her rise up from years of sadness over her job situation to getting a job she actually takes pride in is, for me, a testament of how God hears our prayers even if we don’t think He ever does.

I hope you hang on to your dreams, Bethany. You’re a good writer, and I believe you’ll eventually write a best-selling book – of course, in His time.
- http://shewritesandrights.blogspot.com Bethany Suckrow
  
  I am totally with you, Shalom. What a great story about your mom! My parents have both struggled to find their niche in their careers, and although I know that at times they felt like total failures for not having it figured out while their kids watched them fumble for security, it actually showed me God’s provision and that we’re always better off when we follow His calling.
  
  Thank you again for reading and for your words of encouragement!
Mardra

Yup, yup, yup!
http://www.eileenknowles.com/ Eileen

This is such a great reminder! “God will provide the right work at the right time if I just begin.” Love that. And He uses the “bad” jobs to shape us into who we are today. Nothing is wasted.
- http://shewritesandrights.blogspot.com Bethany Suckrow
  
  “nothing is wasted.” so true, eileen.
http://ablessedmess.tumblr.com/ a blessed mess

Thank you for the honesty you share in your story and the insight!
http://twitter.com/_ForeverHis17 Tara B

This is the stinking truth!! And you have no idea how I needed a reminder of not only being humble, but also being faithful in the small and seemingly insignificant things because they actually matter and are as you said, part of a bigger story. Thank you so much! God bless!
- http://shewritesandrights.blogspot.com Bethany Suckrow
  
  Thanks for reading, Tara!
http://profiles.google.com/danklemitis Daniel Klem

This is so funny, because a friend was sharing this exact same lesson just four nights ago.

This is alos a lesson my parents taught me at a young age. I have only been fired from one job. It was one of my favorites, too! To be fair, I had told my employers my shortcomings at the beginning, and they had no idea I had just gone through a horrible break-up with a fiancee. The other difference in this instance: I was so shocked and ready to move on to the next thing God had for me that I did not have time to be angry, embarrassed, or sad! I actually felt excited! It was two and a half months later that I got another job 1500 miles away, and it was only for the summer! That all led to me moving to another state, meeting the woman who became my wife, getting involved with some great ministries, and getting back into college (I graduate this December!)

Great story!
- http://shewritesandrights.blogspot.com Bethany Suckrow
  
  Yeah, the thing that I didn’t mention here is that I had another waitressing job by the end of the same week, and that six months after that I was hired as a full-time writer at the office I had been working for part time since college. It really is about God moving you forward, even if you experience something that feels like a set back. By the end of that week I felt like it was good that I was done with the previous job, but it took me awhile to realize that no matter what job opportunities I came across, I needed to get rid of that feeling of entitlement and superiority and just be faithful to the work I have, you know?
  
  Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Daniel!
http://www.byebyebitters.com/ Helena Butters

Love it! It’s so hard sometimes to move forward and not get stuck in a “fear of failure” trap.
- http://shewritesandrights.blogspot.com Bethany Suckrow
  
  So true, Helena! Thanks for reading.
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http://ikissedmydategoodnight.com Ruth Rutherford

Great post. Wow. So real. I’ve been there… balancing mediocre jobs while writing my butt off during lunch breaks, evenings, weekends… it’s harder than most people think. And the milestones of “published book” or “published article” seem so unattainable. I remind myself every day that my blog and the articles I write for other publications COUNT. They MEAN SOMETHING. I am honing my craft, writing, creating. And it’s okay. When I allow myself a little grace, I feel proud. I feel accomplished. I hope you can allow yourself that grace, too… you are a great writer!
http://godsadopteddaughter.wordpress.com/ Wendy

I ran into this blog entry while reading another blog. I’m a blog-addict, I admit it. The topic here inspired me to write my own blog entry about my mistakes and how I have learned from them. Thanks for making yourself vulnerable enough to share.
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