The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Read Part IV.

In my high school gym class we did a program called "Project Adventure," which was an Outward Bound-type ropes course designed to build self-confidence by having students push themselves to master challenging physical situations, like climbing tall trees or rappelling from the top of gymnasium walls. I loved it. I can't say any of it was easy, but that's the point. Knowing I could do these things when they were hard has powered me ever since.

There was one task, though, that I never could quite do. We'd climb to a platform at the top of the gym wall and then jump out to a hanging trapeze. Attached to belay lines there was little danger if we failed to reach it, but it was clearly much better to make it. I never could, though, and always fell after my jump.

I think about that trapeze jump now metaphorically, and how it relates to my current situation. Going to law school was like jumping to reach the trapeze, taking a chance to end up somewhere better.

I let myself be very open with law school, trying not to let my pre-existing sense of self interfere with the betterment the experience might offer. I thought that was the thing to do, but on retrospect I'm not so sure.

There is a paternalism that ripples throughout the legal business. Senior partners loom over associates. Professors loom over pupils. The legal world is rife with hierarchies, which is a big reason why it is so hard to align one's natural talents with their vocations. There's a lot to learn, sure, but some of the resistance seems to come from people who've been there before you who did their time and now want to make sure you do yours. Lots of the legal business seems like little more than hazing.

Of course, when you are new to it all it's hard to tell where the hierarchy is a legitimate delineation of experience levels and when it's just arbitrary. If you push back against it in the wrong instance it won't do your development any good.

So I trusted law school, a lot, in letting myself be so open with it. I'm actually not sure that was wrong; I think my law school was fairly deserving of it (but then, I think my law school was better than most). I also trusted that the experience would develop me into a fuller, more actualized person. This thinking is not an insignificant part of why I chose to go to law school. But it may be there where I may have led myself astray. Like I hadn't gotten the memo saying I'd be a fool to think law school could ever help me do this...

The problem with being so open to what the experience had to offer is that I think I forgot too much of myself in the process. I remember a moment near the end of my semester in Germany having sort of an epiphany, suddenly realizing that the whole time I'd been there, meeting and mixing with people including many much younger than me, that I'd pretty much left ten years of my education and experience back in the States. "You have another degree?" a friend had asked almost incredulously. And, indeed, so caught up was I in my present that I really had forgotten about my past. Throughout law school I wanted so much to be open to new opportunities and achievements that I disassociated myself from the ones I'd had before. And that was no good, for the law is full of all sorts of pressures and dysfunction and the thing you really need to weather the storm is a strong sense of self.

In many ways my years in law school became like a second adolescence. To some extent, of course, it is the nature of the beast. One of the first comments I heard upon arriving and indeed thought to myself was how much it felt like high school. Which sort of makes sense given that the majority of the student population has come straight through from high school and college, arriving at law school without ever experiencing that important life lesson of what it means to be an adult without the structure of school supporting it. And then there's also the fact that, like high school, you show up to classes and are taught stuff...

This high schoolish dynamic did present me with certain opportunities. Second childhoods can be fun, especially when you are mature enough to navigate them more successfully. I did get to scratch certain youthful itches that had previously been unscratched, and I'm glad I got to. The problem, though, was that along the way I misplaced to too great an extent the self-confidence my maturity and experience had earned me.

Which leads me to the criticism I found laid at my door recently. It bothered me, as I imagine criticism would bother anyone, but what was more irritating was that I'm perfectly capable of coming up with a nice long list of my own flaws, and these were not the flaws that are on it. It's not actually a positive that I can be my own worst critic. In fact, that's one of my actual flaws... The biggest problem I have with it is how much it makes me inclined to diminish myself. I buy into and kowtow to the hierarchies, I accept the "you must know and I must not" messages this industry keeps emitting, I even accept all sorts of criticism -- and this all needs to stop.

I know better. I am not an adolescent. I am not a scared 26 year old who just got out of school, I am a 33 year old grown-up! And I am entitled to derive the benefit of all my experience. I heard some French on the bus the other day and my mind wandered back to my time working in France. Why do I not think about that more? I worked in France! It's part of my life experience, like so many other things are. I need to not be so detached from them. I did manage, in a moment of confidence, to blurt out to a friend that I've succeeded in my goal of becoming an interesting person - now the job is to do something with that.

Oddly, I think there was an upside to the Great Change that can be helpful. Maybe it's just the result of all the scarring... but I do have some thicker skin. Well, maybe that's not quite the way to phrase it, as clearly this month has been fairly wounding. But the moments of wanting to burst into tears passed quickly, if they ever came at all. Instead I've felt a kind of defiance. "No, you're wrong/unfair. I'm actually fine," are the thoughts that have been coming to mind surprisingly easily.

I'm wary, of course, of becoming arrogant. It's funny how many people find lawyers to be so; perhaps lawyers are as a necessary defense mechanism. But on my list of positive qualities up to now I've been able put down "likable," and I wouldn't want that to be struck off. Especially because that's how I can know people who hold exactly opposite opinions of me than some of my critics. A benefit of maturity is the realization that you can't please everyone - the best you can do is please yourself. As I said, I'm aware of my strengths and weaknesses, and one of those strengths is a willingness to continue to grow as a person no matter how old or already wonderful I am. But a willingness to grow does not require a complete surrender of everything I am, nor should it, particularly because some of those very same weaknesses can also be my greatest strengths and the things I rely on to succeed.

Nonetheless I'm human, and I'm trying to do something important in a field that's full of difficulty, dysfunction, unfairness and frustration. I will have bad days, and, sadly, probably lots of them. But I need to do something to deal with this other metaphor I have stuck in my head: that of a toy car, the kind that you have to first roll backwards in order to make it then propel itself forward. I had begun to wonder if I'd gotten stuck in reverse as I felt everything I aspired to slip further and further away. But maybe not. Maybe it's time - I hope it's time! - I'll soon begin to shoot forward and finally grab that trapeze.