Sarah-Jane Menato

In recent conversations I notice a theme: The challenge of finding language to re-write LinkedIn profiles, or redesign websites and CVs, after cycles of profound change. 

Mainstream professional vocabulary can strangle rather than reveal depth, authority and graceful power. It can trivialise transitions that take place when we root in new ground and begin to work from it in ourselves.  

Shaping words to weave an authentic relevant truth from journeys through messy, painful landscapes, through wastelands of grief and rage is an art. Equally so, finding vocabulary at the sweetly sharp edges of joy. Often poetry serves best but it’s tough to effectively use poetry in a LinkedIn profile or CV.

As light lengthens days in the north and shortens them in the south, re-adjustments are underway, again. Everyone I know has made unexpected adaptations in the past months, and one for me has been “online” as an on-going and significant aspect of my life.

Zoom has profoundly surprised me. At some point last year, I began to envisage the frame of my screen as a loom; collective magic began to emerge from Zoom frames. Holding the unravelling individual threads of our lives, we wove something new; stretching out to each other across the miles we interlaced the weft through the warp. Back and forth between us, our reframed voices and faces became familiar in new ways, sweet rituals emerged, unique rhythms flowed and unexpected patterns materialised. I have come to cherish this new found online alchemy.