Forced to reflect.
My roommate and I watched Bo Burnham’s outtakes from his special Inside yesterday. Highly recommend both. I could gush for hours.
Among the patches of cut footage, one segment of voiceover stopped me in my tracks.
Here, Bo is reflecting on his start as a YouTuber—just a kid in his room posting silly songs. His videos went viral and quickly led him to his eclectic style of standup and resulting career not long after:
“Since I started so young […] there’s a lot of material that I’m just really embarrassed by and makes me cringe for a lot of reasons. Just edgy, stupid, yeah, doesn’t hold up and I don’t know, I often wish I could just […] start over [...] but I know if I didn’t have that early material I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
His stumbling words encased my feelings of being ushered into a similar reflection.
I’m undergoing a career-building program that’s requiring me to unearth the fruit of my life thus far. I’m working to build a portfolio of proof to demonstrate the value I can bring to a company, enhancing my hireability.
The problem is my seemingly relevant work experience feels like a dusty chest of old papers that are hard to decipher now and uncomfortable to present as valuable. It’s been stretching as I’ve combed through old Dropbox accounts and emails in search of this content because I’m coming face-to-face with the reality that so much of my twenties was chasing God.
Chasing God looked like ministry—giving and receiving it. It was immeasurably important, but I don’t know where to place it in what my theology has become today. These years are gaps in my resume that are awkward and difficult to explain.
However, while they seem professionally irrelevant, strangely, the lessons of evangelicalism have bled into my understanding of the roles the program covers. Concepts like marketing and sales, and persuasion and communication.
I’ve sold God.
I’ve marketed God.
I grew up in the business model of the American Evangelical church and have been an employee of God for decades.
Evangelicalism taught me the price acquisition of souls.
Church programs taught me the marketing tactics to land the buy-in of tithers.
Missions taught me how to sell myself to supporters.
In digging up old projects, I came across two fundraising videos I filmed during that time of raising support for my global missions efforts.
The person in these videos is so damn sincere that it’s annoying. She fully believes what she’s sharing. It isn’t a gimmick to manipulate potential donors. She bought in heart and soul and is selling.
Watching these, it’s uncomfortable to know it would take me years to realize how that genuine passion was misplaced.
It all makes sense the reasons why I was saying what I was saying and using the dialect I was using to say it. Tracing back the influence of the community I was a part of at the time and the theology I was fed make sense of the person on the screen.
But it doesn’t make it any less cringy.
I try to approach my past selves with compassion, but in order to evolve, I think there needs to be a process of rejection. And yet, I’ve found myself uneasy about disowning that past persona for the exact reason Bo expressed:
“there’s a lot of material that I’m just really embarrassed by [...] but I know without that early material I wouldn’t be where I am today”
So there’s honor and disdain in the same palm.
In that dichotomy, it’s odd considering exploiting past experiences I have complex feelings about to serve me in some way. I’ve “done business” for God for the greater part of my life—I’m not proud of it, I have complex feelings about it, but it offers material and I can’t deny that.