You’re Not Unqualified, You’re Untranslated
There’s something I wish someone had told me years ago—before the imposter syndrome, before the awkward job interviews, before I started trying to cram my weird, vibrant experience into a LinkedIn-shaped box.
It’s this:
You’re not unqualified. You’re untranslated.
📜 The Myth of “Qualified”
We’ve been taught to believe that qualified means having the exact degree, the exact title, the exact bullet points. That’s not a qualification; it’s formatting. And formatting has more to do with systems than it does with substance.
You can have every skill a job requires and still get passed over because you didn’t phrase it “correctly.” Because your experience came through a path they don’t recognize. Because your brilliance didn’t come with a corporate label attached.
That’s not a lack of ability. That’s a failure of imagination—on their part.
🧠 Real Skills, Misnamed
Let’s say you’ve led a guild in an MMO, moderated a 5,000-person Discord, run a home-based business, raised a neurodivergent kid, or performed on stage.
You’ve developed:
Time management
Group dynamics
Problem-solving
Emotional regulation
Strategic communication
Creative decision-making under pressure
But chances are, you’ve never been taught how to translate those things into professional language that the world respects. Instead, you’ve probably been told they don’t count.
They do. You just haven’t been handed the right dictionary yet.
🪞 Why This Hurts
When the world tells you, over and over again, that the things you’re good at aren’t “marketable,” you start to believe them.
You start editing yourself out of your own résumé. You start questioning if your instincts are worth anything. You start apologizing for the fact that you learned by doing instead of paying someone to teach you. And let me be the one to say: that’s not your fault.
That’s the system working exactly as it was designed—to filter out anyone who didn’t walk the prescribed path. Especially folks who are disabled, neurodivergent, queer, trans, poor, chronically ill, or just… different.
🗝️ Reframing the Narrative
Here’s the reframe I offer to my clients, my students, and my past self:
You’re not starting from scratch.
You’re not missing the mark.
You already have experience. You already have ability.
You just need translation—not transformation.
You don’t need to erase the weirdness, the winding path, the patchwork of jobs and hobbies and survival tactics. You just need to learn how to speak their language without losing your own voice.
🧩 A Thought Experiment
What if you never had to use the phrase “I’m not qualified” again?
What if, instead, you asked:
“How do I explain what I bring in a way this system will recognize—without erasing where I learned it?”
What would change for you?
What opportunities would suddenly feel reachable?
What version of you would be allowed to show up?
🔑 Final Thought
You are not behind. You are not broken. You are not less-than.
You are fluent in a dialect the world is only just beginning to understand. Let’s get you a translator. Not for their sake—for yours.
You’re not unqualified. You’re just untranslated. And that can be fixed.
