Michelle Deshotels

Three strands. One Rope.

I didn’t set out to update my website. I set out to answer a question.

It started, like most things do, with a résumé. Not the first one, not even close — I’d been creating versions of the thing for months, each one tailored for a different role, each one a slightly different performance of myself for an audience I hadn’t chosen. And somewhere in the middle of that, I got tired of it and asked a different question. Not “what do they want to see?” but “who am I, really?” I handed everything I had to an AI and said… pattern match this. Tell me what you see.

What came back stopped me. Because it wasn’t new information. It was information I already had, finally arranged so I could see it. Three things. The same three things. Showing up in every role, every project, every problem I’d ever walked into. Operations. Performance. Technology. Not a list of skills. Three strands that make a structure. The combination is the credential.

From that came two personal statements. One about the three strands. One about how I see AI and why. Not case studies, not credentials… principles. The foundation things sit on. Then came a résumé unlike anything I’d made before. Not optimized for an applicant tracking system. Not positioned for someone else’s expectations. Impact first. Chronology last. Wholly mine. I still have the tailored versions, and I’ll keep making them, but I wanted one that was just me, no posturing for anyone.

And then, somehow, all of it wound up on my website.
Which I hadn’t planned to touch.

That’s the backing in. I rarely approach the site directly. I build something else, and the site receives it. Every update has happened this way… sideways, through some other thing I was trying to figure out. The personal statements led to a résumé that finally felt right. The résumé led to a page redesign. The page redesign led to me standing back and asking whether the whole thing still sounded like one person, built over time with intention, or like scope creep with good taste.

My mother didn’t tell me things once. If she said something once, ‘she said it a million times’. And she said things because she knew you’d need them someday, even if she couldn’t tell you exactly when or for what. One of those things was about getting dressed. Your clothes don’t always have to match, but they should always go together. She wasn’t talking about websites. She wasn’t talking about building a professional portfolio over months of iterative, sideways work. But she knew the principle would hold… somewhere, for something. I’m the one who had to find where it would land.

Because that’s the real work of building something over time. Not uniformity. Coherence. The voice in the first post and the voice in the last one don’t have to be identical, but they should be recognizable as the same person.

This site is the most purely me thing I’ve ever built. I open it, and I’m in every piece of it. The colors, the images, the words that might have gotten a raised eyebrow in a corporate review… all of it. There’s something a little scary about that kind of open space, and something I’ve come to love about it in equal measure. No filter. No sandpaper. Just the thing, built the way I’d build it if no one were watching.

If you’re reading this, something brought you here.
Maybe you’re doing your own version of this…
backing into something, not sure yet what it’s becoming.

That’s fine. Keep building.

The destination shows up in the rearview.