We spend much of our professional lives narrowing our career identity: honing an elevator pitch, curating a LinkedIn profile, projecting a polished version of “who we are” at work, and so on.

On the one hand, this makes sense: after all, others (e.g., colleagues, bosses, recruiters, and hiring managers) are interested in understanding who we are, and providing them a simple, consistent, even archetypical snapshot of our professional self helps them believe that they know us, at least on a professional level, even when they actually don’t (it takes much longer to know a person).

On the other hand, this also encapsulates or traps our self within the unoriginal and predictable parameters of occupational stereotypes (the “creative advertiser,” the “progressive media person,” the “power-hungr

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