To Be Genuine
I was a marketing major meaning I have an actual degree in the field of marketing. I went to four years of rigorous business school. I failed accounting and economics. I spent more time in the music school library then any business school study spot. I do not know how I finished that degree. I proceeded to never work a day in marketing in my life. If I had potential in that field, I never even tried to live up to it. Before I even graduated, somehow, someway, my mock interview professor knew what I did not know: this business world, the stuffy, competitive one at least, was not the life for me.
Last semester of senior year I took some sort of class where we developed our resume and worked on our interview skills. This course concluded in a mandatory mock interview as part of our grade. I remember walking into a small room in the basement level of the business school to meet my mock interviewer. She was a middle aged lady who worked in some department I had never heard of in the school. She was neither rude nor intimidating. I had been in real life interviews before where I spoke confidently and landed the illustrious jobs of ones youth in a senior living community dining hall; however, something about this interview made me incredibly intimidated. Was it because I was being graded? Was it because I had to lie or act the part for a job I did not want nor would ever get because it was fake? Was it because I was in the basement and I thought this lady could easily kill me if she wanted? Not sure, but I do know that by the time the third question was asked, my eyes were welling with tears. Looking back, this does not surprise me at all as I now know that my mother passed on the unique ability to cry in any and all circumstances without the possibility of controlling oneself. At the time though, I perceived tears, particularly in the realm of business school etiquette, as the worst possible thing one could do. Might as well have showed up naked with “BS” carved into my forehead then to cry in an interview and a fake one at that.
Well, I exceeded all that was expected of me by not doing anything expected of me and crying while shakily answering baseline questions while the interviewer stared at me, looking deep into my business-less soul. Per business school normalcy, she gave immediate feedback post mock-interview. As I sat there, barely 22, wiping streaky makeup from my empty eyes, she called me the fated word: genuine. She explained that I came off this way because of the answers I gave and the way I presented myself. I asked around after this experience and nobody equated genuine with crying in public, but I held onto that assessment for years until I experienced something similar. This time I cried again, in front of a group of strangers. One called me genuine, this time with a very tacked onto the front. I would go on to do this multiple more times in my adult life, until this particular special skill of crying in strange circumstances would be labeled as an outward result of an inward battle: depression. Who knew? Certainly not me. I just thought I had acquired a special skill of uncontrollable crying as an adult because I was overly empathic.
No, I am just VERY genuine and turns out, clinically depressed too.
If anyone is looking for a super genuine, self-deprecating, overly sarcastic, and albeit at times, very depressed individual to add to your team, I will send my resume right over!
