I Bring My Attic With Me

Sunshine on Sycamore: Allan Gardens, April 5 2016

I'm procrastinating. I'm supposed to be working on materials that have to be in Cabinet Office on Monday, but, instead, I'm rummaging around in my computer looking for files so old that it took until recently for there to be technology that can read them (I'm referring, of course, to old Windows 2 "Write" files). 

Here's one of the things I found: a lament tossed into the void about my mixed feelings as I filled in an application form, in 1993, for the bar examination course. 

I'll admit, I don't really know what the last sentence means.

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There are a lot of good reasons why I should feel ambivalent about becoming a lawyer, even if I understand this was my plan ever since that fateful comment to my mother in January, 1989: "Ma, I'm going to quit my job and go to law school."

Of course, what a "lawyer" was to me then was the cooly beautiful Susan Dey on L.A. Law. And I had seen only one episode of that estimable entertainment; I'd had no opportunity to notice that some of the characters on even that programme might have given me pause for thought.

No, thought had very little to do with it then, and has far too much to do with it now. 

There is first this peculiar interlude of being a student. It has rearranged my internal workings, my instincts, and such things as how much I rely on caffeine and nicotine and when I get hungry and how much I sleep (or not). I have now a "work" and a "mope guiltily" mode; I do not have a "relax" mode.  

If I have nothing to do and I'm not moping and feeling guilty, I lapse into a mild state of shock, a mode familiar to me from the six months I spent grieving for my father. It is a disconnected way of being: I sit inside myself like a prisoner in a small room with just enough oxygen so long as I don't move, or talk, or think.

An infusion of panic will break this spell. I keep red buckets full in protected corners of my brain for when my indolent stupor strikes me as career-threatening. When I am not working, or moping, or in a catatonic stupor, then I am out somewhere, staying up too late, drinking too much and smoking too many cigarettes. This is no way to face middle age.

The rigours of my professional schooling, I know, will resemble the rigours of my profession about as much as an acorn resembles a fire hydrant. I have to understand that my first year as a lawyer will be as alienating, alien, frustrating and as full of failure as my first year of law school. I will spend a lot of time working hard at accomplishing nothing. I will struggle over piles and towering piles of my own confusion, fear and insecurity. I will, as I did with law school, get the hang of it, and might even get good at it.

But what will I be getting good at? The law undoubtedly is an ass and the Rules of Civil Procedure make sure we all pick up our ears and ropey tail before we enter the court.

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The moral of the story is: Listen to your mixed feelings. 

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen