What do you do when your own resume reveals something about you that could make a potential client not want to work with you?

When I began my medical editing business, I had on my resume, against my husband’s advice, an article I had published in Salon several years ago. He advised me to take it off because the article was about the fact that I smoked, and I was trying to get clients who were physicians, and who were most decidedly anti-smoking. I scoffed: “I’ll be sure to tell them I put the cigarette down long enough to make their edits.” I didn’t even smoke very much, and that is part of what my article was about. But still.

I was in conversations with a client who headed up a tobacco prevention program, though I did not fully understand this at the time he requested my resume. He looked at it and then emailed me back asking me whether I still smoked, because he had never hired someone who smoked before. I sat before the computer in shock. I was stunned. I could not believe my own hubris, my own stupidity. I thought the publication in Salon would outweigh the content. And here I was, about to lose a gig because of it. What to do? I suppose I could have written back that I didn’t smoke anymore. How would he have known? But deep inside, I knew that he would know. It was bad enough to have the habit. I wasn’t going to lie on top of it. At heart, I am a geeky, honest person.

I wrote back briefly that I did still smoke, still in the same small quantities as I had written about in the article, and that I hoped this wouldn’t be a barrier to our working together. As I hit send, my heart sank because I really wanted the chance to work with this client, and I was quite sure that I had blown it before I began. He wrote back that he suspected my attachment to smoking was more emotional than physical, and thanked me for my honesty. I got the gig. What was most important to him was that I respected him enough to tell him the truth. And that day I learned that a lot of people can edit, and there are probably many people who can do my job. But perhaps my ability to do my work had a bit more to do with who I actually was in addition to my abilities than I had previously ever suspected.