You have a sentence ready. I know you do. 🖤
You have rehearsed it in the car. It has a little laugh built into the front of it and a small hurry at the end, and it is designed to get past the dates as quickly as humanly possible before anybody can look at them properly.
That sentence is doing more damage than the dates ever could.
Nobody in that room had decided how to feel about your gap yet. They were waiting to see how you felt about it.
What actually happens in the room
An interviewer sees a gap and has no opinion. Genuinely none. It is a set of numbers on a page and they have seen thousands.
Then you arrive with an apology already loaded, and now there is something to have an opinion about. Not the gap — the flinch. You have just told them this is the soft part, press here.
And here is the thing that will annoy you: the flinch is not even about them. You built it during the eight months, alone, out of every conversation you had with yourself at three in the morning. You have been rehearsing to an audience that was never in the room.
Why we do it 👀
Because for Black women the margin for being unaccounted-for has always been thinner. You were not imagining that. Somebody along the way did make you explain yourself for something a colleague was never asked about, and your body learned that lesson properly.
So the pre-emptive explanation is armour. It is intelligent armour. It is also heavy, and it is being worn into rooms that are not the room where you needed it.
The armour was intelligent. It is also heavy, and you are wearing it into rooms that are not the room where you needed it.
What to do instead
One sentence, past tense, no adjectives, then stop talking.
I took eight months out. I am back and I am looking for X. That is the whole thing. No because. The word because is what turns a fact into a defence.
Then let the silence be theirs. Do not fill it. Filling silence is where the apology sneaks back in, dressed as being personable.
And if somebody presses in a way that is not curiosity but auditing, you have learned something extremely useful about the room, on their money rather than yours. 💅🏾
The takeaway
Write your sentence down this week. Read it back and take out the laugh, the because, and any word that softens it.
What is left will feel too short and too blunt. It is not. It is just what a fact sounds like when it is not carrying an apology on top of it.
Rebuilding and want a real read on where you stand? Start here: Discover