Treat People Like Your Resume
Whether you're a part of USC's Marshall School of Business, or you're simply an individual seeking a job, resumes are often a staple of job searches and acquire a lot of our attention. Keep this in mind when interacting with individuals in your lifetime.
Picture this: you're in your senior year and the terrifying "e word" is creeping up on you. Every adult in your life has told you to prepare to work a minimum wage job that's more entry level than a work study. There's nothing wrong with these jobs, they're part of everyone's plot line, but your university, generation, and internal monologue are all telling you this is the age of greatness. You've purged the internet, your contacts, network, LinkedIn, and university emails for every job under the sun. With each new discovery, you lose a bit of your sanity tailoring your resume for each one. You aren't looking for a serving job that allows your resume to please a plethora of sources, it's the big leagues. As tedious as this is, you know these subtle changes in diction and color scheme are going to help you out in the long run. This is common knowledge—something we all know and dread. So if it is so easily understood that resumes are not a one-size-fits-all, why do we use this mindset for practically every other issue in our contemporary society?
While my own traumas have been able to teach me so many life lessons, they have also revealed to me the holes in how individuals in my community are approached. Eating disorders are such a fragile mental illness to tackle. Death is so incredibly difficult to understand and grow from. A financially independent student is filled with stress at all times of their lives. While medical stabilization/re-feeding, to residential, to outpatient, to cohesive therapy is the equation that often times works, not every individual with an eating disorder is the same. It seems as though the professionals that have helped us in our recovery process have worked harder to tailor their resumes to their practice of choice, rather than their treatment per patient. There are so many factors that go into developing and perpetuating disordered eating rituals and "Ana" thoughts. With that being said, in any aspect of life, it is important to remember humans are not tied to an equation. While medical science professionals, psychological researchers and experts of the sorts are a bank of knowledge to get us through the dreadful aspects of our lives, I encourage the future generations of these fields to work as hard on their patients as they do on their resumes. Treatment is not one-size-fits-all, a work study job is not going to cure the financial insecurities of every fiscally-responsible student, and grief cannot be chalked up to finding the right therapist.
