I went back, and that is totally the script I went to. I was preparing to give up my cat and move in with my mom. Which was terrible, but what happened when I lost my job at 24. I am so grateful to Buffistas for snapping me out of it, but I don't know what I would do if I lost my job, so I feel for you.

Yeah, I'm trying not to go straight to the worst-case scenario. It's especially bad because there are a lot of jobs I can't do anymore because I can't stand or walk for long. I have to have a desk job.

Hm. My company calls stuff like that "leadership" and I should probably add it to my resume, too.Maybe. a "functional resume" would be helpful? Organized by types of stuff you actually did rather than chronologically by job title.

Zen I'm glad we are here to help. what you are describing -managing people without making hiring/firing decisions- makes me think about a recent Ask a Manager post. I think it was about resume writing and how to phrase that kind of position but I'm not sure. Ask a Manager is a really good resource for resume writing info and interview tips and how to transition to new jobs, etc.

Ask a Manager is pretty anti-functional resume, IIRC. It's normally used when there's a big gap in employment. But it's definitely a great place to check for resources.

I'm sorry, Zen. It's scary to be laid off mid career. That happened to me in 2014. It took several months, and I'm now in a job that's way better than the previous one. But while hunting I worried about what would happen to me, my cat, and whether anyone would ever want to hire me again. The uncertainty is scary.

Project management doesn't imply hiring and firing power in the publishing circles I move in, Zen. Even if project managers do get to weigh in on who they'd like to have on a project or who's not working out, people higher up the food chains make those actual decisions. PMs have always been the people who set up workflows, maintain schedules, track progress on various tasks, and act as the point person with the clients for feedback and distributing information. The cat herder, if you will.

I'm sorry you're in such a shitty place, Zen. But definitely what you were doing is managing/supervising/etc., and like Matt said, describing it as managing projects doesn't imply hiring and firing, just managing the work. Good luck.

But friends with basically normal parents (what even IS that?) just don't understand, and come at me with "But they're your paaaaaaaarents!", like just because their DNA made me I have to let them continue to do damaging shit. I don't. And people who never experienced that don't understand it.

I'm sorry, but friends who say that are terrible. I have/had basically normal parents, and I'm still fully able to understand when people tell me about bad parents, and more to the point, able to take their word for it when they say what they need to do!

There's a lot of jargon to "project management", at least at my place. I probably wouldn't use that phrase on a resume unless I was comfortable using the jargon. You could still say "managed special projects as needed" or whatever.

The project manager job I have on my resume where I was not anyone's boss, but I bossed them around I wrote "prioritized daily work for XXX department".

Also your brain is wrong.