Where Your Body Takes You
by Silvia Passiflora, Editor | Scriptaluna
April 20, 2026
Maia was one of my students at The Art Institute of Atlanta, where I taught Culinary Arts Management. The class was Resume Writing. Mandatory course material, dry quizzes, the usual scaffolding of an academic program. But honestly, the class was always about one thing: the resume package. What you bring into a room before you ever open your mouth.
During a class break, I was chatting with Maia — the kind of casual conversation where the real teaching happens — and she mentioned she was a certified scuba diver.
I stopped. I said: why isn't that on your resume?
She looked at me the way students look at you when they think you've made an error. "Chef," she said, "that's not a culinary skill."
I told her: preparation underwater is a matter of life and death. You check every valve. You account for every variable. You do not improvise at depth.
That is mise-en-place — the classical French culinary discipline of total preparation, of having everything in its place before the heat comes up. It's what scuba diving and a James Beard kitchen have in common: the food has to go out world-class perfect, and still as fast as a taco stand.
She had separated her life into folders. The culinary folder. The personal folder. The scuba folder. And she had handed me only one of them, because she had been trained — by school, by industry, by the quiet architecture of professional culture — to believe that the other folders didn't count in this room.
I have been thinking about Maia lately because I have been building schema.
Schema, or JSON L-D, is the structured data that lives in the code of a website — invisible to visitors, legible to search engines and knowledge graphs and rights databases. It's how you tell the machines: here is who this person is. Here is what they have done. Here's how all of it connects.
My own schema now runs over two thousand lines. It took months. And the hardest part was never the code.
You don't need to be able to write code to put great schema in your site. But you do have to gather the information to put in it.
In my case, I gathered the schema and I asked for help writing the code. If you want to see how that works in practice, I covered it in my most recent Foundations video in Scriptaluna.com.
As someone who has seen countless resumes, the ones I find memorable are the ones with sticky information. The ones filed under personal history instead of professional — the hobby you never thought to mention, or the certification you earned in a field you no longer work in.
Schema and resumes tell stories. They're stories arranged for use. Sometimes the most important parts are the ones we almost leave out.
Most independent artists I meet are sitting on a full life and presenting a thin folder. It's not because they haven't done the work — it's because no one told them the other folders count.
That random hobby belongs in the conversation. Those guilty pleasures, the language you speak at home, the instrument you play at night. These are all part of the same entity, the same person, the same story the machines are trying to read.
The schema just makes it legible. The gathering makes it legible to you first.
There is one more step. It may be the hardest one. At some point — if you spread all the folders on the table and look long enough — you may start to see a thread running through all of them. Not a list of skills. A through-line. A way you move through the world that shows up identically in every room you have ever entered.
Walk into a Barnes & Noble bookstore — not looking for anything in particular — and notice where your body takes you without thinking. That belongs in the schema.
It was never separate.
The catered school lunches and the cooking classes documented here are from Word of Mouth Cooking Club. You can find more at instagram.com/wordofmouthcookingclub.
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