To: hiring@jobcareerstuff

Subject: Re: Application Status 

Date Saved: November 9, 2025

“To be honest, I don't actually care about the ‘synergy’ mentioned in the job description. I just wanted to know if there’s a version of my life where I don’t spend my twenties wondering where I went wrong. I’m attaching a portfolio that feels wrong because I’m trying to sound like a person who has it all figured out, but—”

—

The most honest room that I own is my drafts folder, where the chairs are mismatched and the walls were never fully painted.

According to my Oma and Appa, I was an easy child—quiet, content in a stroller—until the moment I started crying. Once I began, I could never seem to stop.

In elementary school, everything seemed to make me cry. I would cry when my mom lectured my brother because seeing someone else upset made my chest hurt. I would cry because a car ride that ran on too long would begin to feel unsafe. My parents would wake up almost nightly to me standing in their doorway, shaking with some sort of terminal unhappiness. I could never voice the reasons for why I reacted this way, and as I grew up, the nursery-rhyme sadness turned into something sharper.

In high school, I cried before meals and after every therapy session or doctor’s appointment. Never during them, though. I liked the idea of a clean record, a perfect score. I hated the idea of this part of myself becoming documented and rarely showed my face at school.

Freshman year of college, I cried in my dorm every Wednesday night. Thursdays, in sophomore fall. Never letting myself explain, out of fear that my words would be misunderstood. Then, at the start of the spring semester sophomore year, it all stopped. All the unidentified knots in my throat suddenly felt more like glee.

Looking back, I realise that it was because I began to avoid telling the truth. These deceptions weren’t socially scandalous. Rather, I filled my message inbox with ghost texts, replacing “i’m not doing well actually” with “i’m goooood, how was your weekend? :D.” Friendships were maintained by not mentioning small grievances and shared silences blanketed a graveyard of conversations too deep, too exhausting to exhume.

When you stop letting yourself be seen, you become a story told to someone who doesn’t know the ending. This is how I ended up at a bus stop, looking a stranger in the eye and handing him a lie as if it were a gift. I think his name started with a T.

T was 65 years old, born and raised in Rhode Island. He asked me if I was a student. I said yes. He asked what I study.

Furniture Design.

Wow, first I’m hearing about that sort of thing. You make chairs?

I have.

John, this little girl makes chairs! Can you believe it? You gonna make a living off doing that? I don’t know how all that kind of stuff works.

Maybe. I want to go into antique restoration. I’m more into fixing things.

Well that’s even better. You working yet or just studying? 

I’ll be working in California soon.

Your parents must be proud. 

Thank you.

T was the first person I told this good news to. Actually, I told him long before it even happened. Let me explain.

For me, strangers have always been the easiest to talk to, because with strangers, anything goes. I can be whoever I want to be that day. I’m never afraid of oversharing because I’m not really telling them about me, so it doesn’t really matter, does it? I’ve been an architecture student hoping to go abroad. I’ve been a film major, aspiring to make documentaries about disappearing oceans and climate change.

These are all lives that I wonder if I would have liked to live. In my journal, I call them “specimens,” failed versions of myself. Failed, not necessarily in a negative way, but as things which might have been but weren’t. I used to spend a lot of time mourning them. Perhaps these jagged truths were momentary reliefs that simulated being heard.

My summer before junior year took place in Boston on a sublease I couldn’t afford and a series of shifts so far away that my paychecks vanished into Uber rides home. I was a ghost in my own apartment, preferring the disposable friction of a party to the heaviness of a potential connection with my roommates. First impressions were blissful; second dates were never in the picture. It was just so much easier to be a new person every night than to be the same failing one every morning. I disliked the idea of letting anyone on to who I really was because honestly, I didn’t even really know myself.

Every moment was fleeting. I never told anyone about the yesterdays, just about how excited I was for the tonights. Noise was essential because I got bored easily, and I would put myself in dangerous situations just for the rush, just to avoid the awkward silence that I felt when I was alone with myself. I dreaded reality and chose thrill over suspense. Acting this way offloaded some kind of weight without actually dropping any burden.

Just over a year ago, around midway through fall semester of my junior year, the rush wore out. All of my truths came flooding out in the dorm room of a boy I had met hardly two months prior. There was no grand trigger, just the way he didn’t look away when I stumbled over a sentence. The feeling of safety that comes with hearing the words “I want to know you. Every part of you, everything about you” was foreign to me. It took a year into our relationship for me to stop crying. I told him I loved him four months in, as well as a few moments ago today.

The fear of saying the wrong thing has always kept me from saying anything at all, but I no longer feel like I have to create a story to explain myself as a person. It takes a few minutes, often closer to an hour, but I can cry and speak at the same time now. Short sentences are more than enough. “This hurts. I want to fix it.”

I thought I wanted to do so many things that would never end up happening. I never expected that what I have and who I am, now, would feel so right.

—

To: hiring@jobcareerstuff

Subject: Re: Application Status

Date Saved: February 12, 2026

“Dear Recruitment Team at Job Career Stuff,

In my drafts folder, there is a version of this letter where I admit that ‘synergy’ is a word I rarely use, and that my greatest fear is wasting away my twenties. But the reason I am sending this version instead is because I’ve realised that my best work happens when I stop performing and start fixing.

My background in furniture design and my passion for antique restoration come from a very specific place: a deep respect for things that have been broken but are worth saving. Restoration requires a level of honesty that most modern manufacturing ignores—you have to understand the original intent of the piece in order for the repair to be seamless.

I am moving to California soon, not as a specimen of a person who has it all figured out, but as a craftswoman who excels at patient execution, authentic communication, and identifying structural weakness. I’ve learned that “I don’t know, but I will find out” holds far more value than a polished lie.

I’ve attached my portfolio below. It represents the versions of my work that I am most proud of, in which the joints are tight and the finish is true. I would love the opportunity to bring that same level of grounded, honest craftsmanship to Job Career Stuff.”

Best regards,

Olivia Moon