All The Work

I started my media career before the internet was a big thing. It was a thing, but it wasn’t the thing. As time went on, I wrote in a variety of mediums and collected things for my portfolio. Though sometimes back then, it wasn’t as easy as it is now when everything is online. My portfolio was pieces of paper stuck in a portfolio book. Pieces of paper and books that have given way to years of storage or moves or salt air by the sea.

Now that I’d like to continue my work, it’s difficult going back trying to recapture everything I’ve done. Sometimes I can’t even prove I did its because it’s not online. I thought I was the only person in this predicament, until I listened to one of my favorite – who am I kidding, it is my favorite – podcasts, Scriptnotes. Someone else had written in with the question “how do I prove I did a thing if it’s not online, or I didn’t get credit” (like in a film or TV). Briefly, both hosts acknowledged that this happens all the time. People don’t always get credit for a thing they did.

And this is not in a bragedoshish way, this is a matter of securing a job. The answer is, there isn’t much we can do. So, I’m plugging away at certain types of projects to produce much needed samples, which thankfully are easier to do now. But man, if I could tell my younger self one thing it would be to “hang on to a copy of everything you do and get letters of recommendation from every job that you’re not credited for.” Though technically that’s two things.

Part of this stems from that feeling we all have sometimes of Imposter syndrome. And when I felt this way, it seemed far too bold to ask for a letter or ask for a copy of something. Like, I don’t deserve it somehow. But I have to look at life and time the way I encounter it – forward, not backward. I haven’t mastered multiverse just yet. Maybe someday…