oyster mushroom resume

I recently overhauled my resume for the first time in many years. Immersed in the whole bullet point-ification process of turning my diverse life's work into legible, palatable, impressive sounding bites. All the churning discomfort of self-packaging in this very particular type of (sellable) package.

With my mind in resume world, I sank into the (utterly fabulous) mycelial monthly writers' gathering with Jen Violi. Each month is textured with a particular theme, and this one was mushrooms. She offered fungal food for thought prompts on mysterious powers that overthrow propriety, recycling death, mycophobia, unpredictable fruiting and "power under". The line that I went with for our collective writing time was: All the ways I'm a mushroom...

The convergence of these two writing moments = a surreal, cathartic resume of oyster mushroom skills.

All the ways I’m a mushroom. There are types of mushrooms, like oyster mushrooms, that are able to absorb toxic waste, harmful oil spills, pervasive poisons, work their magic of myco-remediation, and transmute the poison so that one could grow food in the soil and even eat the mushroom. It is alchemy, not martyrdom.

I used to say that I wish I could put “I aspire to be the type of mushroom that transforms toxicity” in the top line of my professional resume. It would make all the disparate work lives and experience and skills make sense. Now I am old enough and brave enough to include this. What is it to be pro-aging and anti-fascist if not to open cracks in stale edifices so that underground swirling worlds can bust through and make the familiar ever more strange, ever more edible, ever more hospitable?

My resume now reads:

A lifelong decomposer, Zara has worked as a mushroom in private and professional life. 

Oyster mushroom skills include:

• Longtime passion for turning poison into medicine.
  • Specialized focus on poisons of white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, ableism and body shame. 
  • Specialized focus on medicines of curiosity, multispecies kinship, heart rearranging compassion, Earthling embodiment.
• Years of experience in creating spaces for white people to alchemize shame. 
• Decades of listening to people’s bodies with freakishly warm hands that do not judge.
• Years of experience creating educational spaces for people dehumanized in educational institutions to slough off a lifetime of internalized messages, unearth their unabashed excitement, and get reacquainted with the basic equation of learning equals aliveness.
• 50 years of composting inheritances. 
• Notable skill of turning failure into fertilizer as needed, and accelerating process of decay on demand.
• Underground root system tracker: decades spent tracing the roots of everything that has come between me and feeling at home in my body and how this dark web connects to everything and everyone i hold dear. 
• Intergenerational experience with lung disease, addiction and grief, first hand experience with the dangers of absorbing unknown toxins and letting them accumulate.
• Recent works include enlisting anti-fascist ancestors to aid and abet our struggling hearts, forming somatic practices to dodge falling debris of collapsing empire while going about daily business, and making large amounts of handmade pasta.
• Spent entire adulthood working to reframe death as something to not be feared, including official replacement of the medical colloquialism to refer to someone approaching death from “circling the drain” to “evaporating into the Sun”, which is now used in all hospitals. In public usage, worked to transform the phrase, “left the planet” to become “more fully merged with the planet”, “the curtains closed” to “the show now begins”, and “pushing up daisies” to, “well, why the hell wouldn’t you want to do that with your one wild and precious death??”
• Zara has also volunteered extensively as a mushroom, gently and silently eating toxins in a wide range of spaces. Known for adding delicious sauces to what many consider unpalatable, she mushrooms primarily on colonial soil so that regenerative futures may become more possible. She is currently working on a recipe book.
• All that being said, all that being said. I close my eyes while hearing news of bombs and see California spring wildflowers all around. I open my eyes to take in wildflowers and can think only of bombs. Zara is currently struggling with how to be a human mushroom here, in this devastating spring. What do our hearts become in proximity to inconceivable weaponry and uncontainable blossoming? 
• I am available for a job interview if we can endlessly fall into that question together.