On not starting from scratch
and why I'm obsessed with palimpsest
Welcome back to The Ecstatic Review!
I’m back from taking my first spring break in forever to celebrate both my birthday and Christmas (story for another time). I spent time with family, wandered around bookstores, slept in, ate princess cake, mapped out the next season of EV, and began revamping my portfolio for the first time in years.
You’d think that as someone who continually gives feedback and guidance on portfolios that mine would be up to date, but you know what they say about the cobbler’s kids: They could really use some new project highlights. Ba dum bum.
Birthdays and portfolios actually have a lot in common, namely that they can make it really tempting to want to start from scratch. (See also: resumes, new years, haircuts.) If you’ve ever felt the temptation to ditch You Then for You Now, I’d like to offer an alternative approach that doesn’t involve dividing yourself in two—and instead, celebrates all of you.
I’m here to share it, ironically, in two parts: a concept to consider, and a step-by-step exercise with examples for applying it to your portfolio, resume, bio, and all of the other places where you talk about your work and you.
Part 1 is for everybody and Part 2 is for paid subscribers. (If you’d like to upgrade to paid, it’s about the price of a cake slice a month and aims to be a gift that keeps on giving.)
I could easily write a whole dissertation about this—but since nobody has time for that, I’ve done my best to balance substance with succinctness. Let’s jump in!
I want to introduce you to an idea whose influence can be found all throughout Ecstatic Voice, from the visual brand identity to the EV process.
That idea is palimpsest. Say it with me: PAL-imp-sest! Triple plosives are fun.
If palimpsest sounds like something your college theater major boyfriend would toss into conversation while reading Allen Ginsberg at the local coffee hangout, that’s exactly where I heard it the first time.
Decades later, it’s become one of my favorite metaphors for thinking about the progression of a career and a life, especially in a culture that seems to be obsessed with wiping the slate clean.
With what am I obsessed? Palimpsest.
A palimpsest refers to a medieval manuscript that was written and rewritten on many times, and so it carries visible traces of its earlier writing. It has practical origins: parchment was expensive back in the Middle Ages, so scribes would scrub off the previous writing to make room for new.
Since then, the concept of palimpsest has grown to encompass anything where newer layers sit atop older ones—or at least that’s how I think about it. There are lots of wonderful examples of this in visual art; one I recently discovered is Karel Martens’s letterpress monoprints (give me card catalogs and geometry all day):
When palimpsest mysteriously resurfaced in my brain, I was a year or so in to formalizing the Ecstatic Voice approach, working with people who’d followed all kinds of interesting paths and felt compelled to throw out entire parts of them in order to do something different.
Sometimes that showed up as a portfolio or resume with a gap, or one that began years into a career. Other times I could just sense that there was missing information.
Many more times it came as an earnest request to start from scratch.
I got it then, and I get it now. Not that long ago, there was a version of me who felt like I needed to shove parts of my story deep in the back of a drawer in order to make enough sense for where I wanted to go next.
What was I supposed to do about the sketch comedy in my SEO? Where did my background in math fit into the equation? That corporate consulting gig sounded interesting, but what the heck should I say when they find out I own 33 wigs?
If what you’ve done seems at odds with what you’d like to do, it’s completely logical to worry that your past and/or present endeavors might confuse people or undermine your credibility. They might not get it, and so they might not get you.
It can feel much easier and far less risky to rule out those parts of your path before others can, by positioning yourself as a blank canvas instead of what you actually are: a layered human being who carries traces of twists and turns, starts and stops, divergence and do-overs, and all of the other fascinating variations of your unique and dynamic path.
It occurred to me that no one was stopping me from scrubbing the parts of mine that I wasn’t sure what to do with. I could delete the sketch comedy photos, unlist the math videos, stash the wigs in my closet, and pretend like none of it ever happened.
But then how would I explain that thing where I can take one idea and spin it into 10? Sketch comedy taught me that. Or my ability to turn formulaic resume bullets into their own kind of poetry? That’s all geometric proofs right there. The way I can shift in and out of distinct points of view so fast I don’t even realize I’m doing it half the time? 33 wigs would all be robbed of the credit they deserve.
And what about the friends, teachers, collaborators, and everyone else who was a part of those experiences? What about the failures that led to lightbulbs, the stuff I’d worked so hard to figure out, the significant growth I’d experienced? What about the fact that I still enjoyed solving proofs in my free time? It felt like I’d be tossing all of that out, too.
I didn’t want to toss it out. And the good news is I didn’t have to.
I didn’t need to shove anything into a drawer; I just needed a way of telling my story that would connect the dots for myself, and then for others, and build a bridge from where I’d been to where I was going. Not even build a bridge, but reveal one: one that was already part of my path just like all of the others, and would help me see the natural progression—and the real value—of my layered experience.
In other words, Me Then and Me Now could just be Me, period.
I know what you might be thinking: “But what about the parts that I don’t want to shine through, even faintly?” I hear you—and I’m not saying that they have to. In fact, part of the art of communication is getting to choose where to shine the light and how much to reveal at any given time. As I say to everyone I work with: You get to decide what you want to share, how you want to share it, when, and with whom.
But what I am suggesting is that before you leave out or let go of parts of your story, see what happens if you can give yourself the benefit of identifying the gold you’ve gathered from them. You might be pleasantly surprised. That gold might even come with an engine that powers you forward faster than you might have thought.
Toss out the things that don’t serve you or that you’ve outgrown: of course. But just make sure you’re not tossing out the good stuff, too.
I used to think of birthdays as a chance to start all the way over. This year all I want to do is gather the good stuff in. I want to add more layers while carrying the hard-fought foundation forward; go where I’m headed while celebrating the ground I’ve covered; find new ways to begin again while taking encouragement from knowing that I don’t have to start from scratch.
And in case you’re curious, my revamped portfolio includes the geometry and the sketch comedy, and yes: the wigs. They’re not front and center because other things are now, but each has its defined role in the story and strategy of how this current expression of my work came to be in my own palimpsest path.
So how do you do that for you? Let’s practice.