I want to be honest about where I was when I started building the event portfolio: exhausted from job searching, deeply discouraged, and skeptical that doing more job-search tasks would produce anything different than the last several years had. When my job coach and I sketched out a rough framework together, I could see the shape of what it needed to be. I just wasn’t sure I had the energy to build it.
I started anyway.
Within a few days, I had barely looked up.
It poured out. I’ve been building websites since 1996, and WordPress is genuinely comfortable territory for me — I’m a front-end content creator more than a designer or developer, but everything the portfolio required came easily. Uploading photos, organizing galleries, writing descriptions of my role in each project, pulling together PDFs and dates and documentation. The technical work didn’t slow me down, which meant I could just keep going. And I did. About twenty hours of work over roughly four days, and it didn’t feel like twenty hours. It felt like something clicking into place.
The harder work was the excavation.
To build the portfolio, I went digging. Old hard drives. Photo archives. Flickr. The Internet Archive, for projects whose URLs had long since gone dark. Graphic design files. Promotional materials. Documents and spreadsheets and event programs from years I had half-forgotten. And as I dug, things surfaced.
I remembered the reading series I ran for a year in New York. I remembered serving on the board of a regional conference. I remembered the small private groups I’d facilitated for years — intimate, carefully held, logistically precise in their own quiet way. One by one, things I had filed under “other work” or “community stuff” or simply not thought about in years came back into focus as exactly what they were: events I had produced.
The organizational challenge became its own kind of revelation. I kept trying to sort my experience into categories for the portfolio, and kept running out of boxes. I’d think but where does this fit — pondering nearly two decades of retreat and workshop production — and then realize I needed a whole new category. And then another. The shape of my event experience kept expanding as I looked at it directly, which I hadn’t really done before.
That’s the thing about a through-line: you don’t always see it while you’re living it. You’re just doing the work in front of you. It took laying it all out — chronologically, categorically, with photos and documentation and my own words describing what I actually did — to see how consistent it had been. Events hadn’t been a side project or an occasional responsibility. They had been the spine of my professional life, running through almost every chapter, even the ones I’d been calling something else.
When I finally looked up after those four days and started clicking through the finished site — all the categories, all the case studies, all the evidence of what I’d actually built over the years — it felt a little magical. Not because I’d made something impressive to show other people. But because I could finally see it myself.
From there, the next steps were obvious. A shorter PDF version of the portfolio to include with job applications. An updated LinkedIn focused on event experience. A skills-based resume that led with what I actually know how to do. And then: research. Informational interviews. Reaching out to contacts in the Seattle-area events industry, and sending cold emails to people I’d never met, hoping some of them would be willing to talk.
That’s where Part 3 picks up.