I made a mistake and then I fixed it.

I knew not long into practicing law that I made a career mistake. But, I felt trapped. My ego, my financial situation, my student loans, my expectations of myself, the expectations of others — all of these things made me feel as though I had no choice but to make a go of it. So, made a go of it I did for 12 years. Hell, I knew I hated being a lawyer when I started this blog, but all you have to do is read the title I chose – ProfMomEsq – or the “About Me” page to see how I nonetheless wrapped up law practice into my personal identity.

It probably isn’t worth it to rehash all the reasons why I don’t like law practice. There are too many reasons, and I’ve written about it before. I suppose some of the reasons apply to lawyers in general, but many apply only to me. The truth – which took me a very long time to realize – is that the reasons I hate being a lawyer are neither “right” nor “wrong.” They just are. So, ultimately, I had only a simple choice: did I want to be happy or unhappy? Pretty easy, right?

Yet, it took me 12 years — 12 YEARS — to find the strength not just to say I don’t want to be a lawyer anymore but to actually do something about it. You know what I did? I quit being a lawyer. Friday is my last day. I sent my goodbye email to my colleagues yesterday. I start an entirely new, non-lawyer job on Monday. And while I am a little nervous, I am mostly so thrilled that I feel as though I float down the hallways of the firm now, leaving a trail of pixie dust and the vague scent of warm chocolate chip cookies in my wake. I keep looking at myself in the mirror with this feeling of relief and surprise that – yep – I still exist even though I jettisoned the bar card.

As sunshine-y and rainbow-y as I am for myself, I can’t help but be sad for the lawyers I’ve talked to this week – colleagues, opposing counsel, clients – who remark about how jealous or envious they are of my decision to leave the profession or how brave I am to take this step. It wasn’t bravery that got me here. It was desperation. And, the envy is wasted energy. I want to tell each of them to spend that energy finding their passions. But, I know that the words are not enough. Like losing weight, quitting smoking or ending a bad relationship, leaving a career takes will power, and it is so hard to find the will. This is true even if your head understands that the change would be “good” for you, because we easily confuse “good” the feeling with “good” the outcome. Eating chocolate cake feels good. The rush of nicotine feels good. The momentary affection of someone you desperately want to love you feels good. But, that kind of “good” works some mischievous chemical voodoo on our brains and hearts that makes what is truly “good” (e.g, healthy) for us seem less desirable – to hell with logic and reason.

I had to get to the very edge of my sanity to understand this and – more importantly – to do something about it. So, while I listen to the stream of lawyers expressing envy or jealousy at my escape from the billable-hours grind, my heart aches for them. The answer is so simple it is literally unbelievable: do something else. But, we humans are so good at “justifying” where we are when we believe we are stuck. I won’t make as much money. I still have student loans. It will be better when I make partner. My clients need me. I don’t want to waste my degree. My family/friends/peers will think I’m a loser/quitter/weak/stupid.

What I learned (thanks to the happy coincidence of meeting a social worker who “got” me) is to stop evaluating my life choices as “right” or “wrong” and to start evaluating them as “healthy” or “unhealthy.”

Well, hey there, you know what’s not healthy? Spending more time doing a soul-sucking job that you absolutely hate than you do with the family and friends you love. It makes you a surprisingly unpleasant person. Paradoxically for me, it also made me put up with a lot of crap that I never in a million years would imagine tolerating.

Many folks I know are fond of the expression, “God gives you only what you can handle.” I don’t think that’s true. I have complicated feelings about God, but even when I’m open to the idea of a supreme being who has a plan for my life, I would have to believe that God grossly overestimates my threshold capacity for stress if he thinks I can “handle” the competing demands of law practice, raising two children, being a wife, addressing financial setbacks and learning/navigating the ins and outs of special education in a public school bureaucracy. Rather, I think God/life/karma/the universe deliberately presents us with events we can’t handle as a means of getting our attention and forcing us to make a decision. If I really bought into the God-gives-you-only-what-you-can-handle philosophy, I honestly believe I would be dead. I would’ve struggled mightily to continue to balance all those things, and I would’ve had a heart attack – a literal, chest-crushing heart attack. Instead, I saw it (eventually and after a lot of therapy) as a message: decide what is most important and focus on that.

My children are important to me. My husband is important to me. I am important to me. Being a lawyer is not important to me. I don’t view working as optional because of our family’s financial situation, but “needing” to work doesn’t mean I “need” to be a lawyer. And, funny enough, there are actually other (better) paying and more satisfying jobs out there!

So … what’s my point? Don’t waste your life doing what you think is “right,” when you can dedicate your life to doing what is healthy. Don’t confuse what feels good with what is good. Start small – plan every day to do just one thing that is healthy for you, and watch it snowball. Two months ago, I walked into an intensive outpatient therapy group for my panic disorder, and I stunned a room full of people dealing with abuse, addiction, disorders and depression into absolute silence when I told the story of my life. Five weeks later, I left that group hearing the applause of its members when I announced I had a new job and was on the path to a new career. That happened because every day I had to commit to doing something better, and every day I was held accountable for it by others until I was strong enough to hold myself accountable.

I know a lot of you reading this are balancing or juggling your own competing responsibilities, so I challenge you to find one thing – no matter how big or small – you will commit to doing today to help make your life better. Not your child’s life, not your spouse’s life, not you parent’s life — YOUR LIFE. Then, feel free to share it if you want some accountability.

In the meantime, I’ll be over here, thinking up a new name for this blog. 🙂

The One Where I Find Out I Can’t Juggle

I’m not crazy, M’Lynn.  I’ve just been in a very bad mood for the last 40 years.  — Ouiser Boudreaux, ‘Steel Magnolias’

Here’s the thing about juggling.  If you think too much about the mechanics of keeping the balls in the air, you are bound to drop them.  Maybe you’ll get lucky and drop only one.  But, more often than not, everything’s gonna wind up on the floor and getting away from you.

For the past two months, I’ve spent an awful lot of time thinking about the mechanics of juggling, and shit is hitting the floor.

I am certain that until the moment I actually went to work as a lawyer — sat down behind the desk, staring at my name on letterhead — I believed I could simultaneously be a spectacular mom and a kick-ass professional.  Oh, sure, I had talked to or read about other moms who were “struggling” with finding a balance between work and home.  But, that was them, and I am me.  My whole life, I’ve always managed to land on my feet.  Things work out because they just have to work out.  Over the course of fourteen years, I’ve managed to balance law practice, a teaching career, parenting, volunteer work, running a house and the occasional side project.

Lately, though, I’ve been asking myself:  why?  I can’t be doing all this for my kids.  If given a choice between me being home and available to them or constantly at work or traveling, I think they’d choose to have me home.  I can’t be doing this for my husband, who has to pick up the slack when I’m away (which is a lot) and who has had to essentially put his own career on hold to accommodate mine.  I can’t even be doing this for me, because I’m too damn busy getting through this stuff to actually enjoy any of it.

Sure, I’ve had some successes.  I’ve scored some big wins for clients.  I’ve had my work complimented by judges in open court.  I’ve seen many of my former students go on to become lawyers and do well for themselves.  I save all the emails from students that come years later, thanking me for what they learned in my classes.  I have the best husband a girl could ever hope to have (and not just because he hasn’t killed me yet).  I have two beautiful, amazing kids.

This should be enough, right?  To ask for any more than this is selfish and greedy.  Well, I don’t want more; I want less.  I want to forget this stuff:

• The first day you drop your baby off at daycare will be the singularly worst day of your life.  You will bill 1.1 hours that day.
• The day you are to take your first deposition, your son’s school will call to say he has a fever.  There will be no one else who can pick him up.  There’s no one else you really want to pick him up.  But, you’re a second-year associate, and telling your male supervising partner (whose wife stays at home with their kids) that you need to leave makes you want to put a hot stick through your eye.
• There will be countless Saturdays that you can’t go to the park, or bowling, or to a movie, because you’re trying to catch up on billable hours.  You hate yourself as you start yet another Thomas the Tank Engine video.
• You will be in a car accident and have your hand broken, make a Herculean effort to get your kids to school and yourself to work, and have a supervising partner look at your cast as you walk in the door and ask, “Where’s my brief?”
• You and your spouse will have a scheduling conflict and no one to watch your daughter, so you will hide her under your desk at work as she naps while you get in as many billable hours as possible.
• The phrase “quality of life” describes the difference between working Saturdays and Sundays or just one of them.
• You will be shocked to find sympathy for this struggle more from male lawyers than from female lawyers — especially the female lawyers who do not have children.  There are women who will absolutely despise you for taking maternity leave.  You, in turn, will want to strangle the women in your firm who take maternity leave and then string the firm along on a return-to-work date only to decide not to return at all.
• It’s really fucking hard to leave your kids everyday to go to work if you don’t absolutely love what you do, no matter how good you might be at it or how much money it might provide your family.  You do not love being a lawyer.
• It will be cause for celebration in your house when you are actually home for dinner.  If you make dinner, your family will be confused by the plates and silverware as they search for bags, boxes and sporks.
• Your daughter will be diagnosed with autism, but you will stay in your job for years because of the guilt you feel about “wasting” $100,000 on a legal education and for breaking promises you made to the firm that supported you.
• You will develop insomnia and random but real pain throughout your body.  Your doctor will suggest you see a mental health professional, and you will not only ignore him, you will actively look for another doctor, because yours is clearly an idiot.  (Except, you know, that he’s not.)
• You will say mean things to your husband and your children that you don’t really want to say but that fly out of your mouth because you are exhausted and bitter.  The words I’m sorry are said way too often.
• You will end up in a puddle on the floor of a therapist’s office, begging her to save you from yourself.

So, here’s what I’ve realized in the past couple of months.  Yes, there are women who do it – who manage career success and still make soccer games and dance recitals and band concerts.  I am not one of those women, and its not just because I have a daughter with special needs (although that’s really forced me to confront this).  So, on Friday, I put the balls down and took a leave of absence from my law firm.  What I finally realized is that if I don’t take care of myself, I am no good to anyone else.  I might be able to make up billable hours, but I can’t make up for lost time.  There is no one at the finish line of life handing out medals for juggling, and I don’t want a medal anyway.  I want kisses and hugs.  I want to read books, play in the park, make flashcards, chaperone field trips and make dinner every night.  I want to exercise more than my brain.  I want to be present in my life instead of just going through the motions of living it, building a resume that looks good on paper but leaves nothing meaningful in my wake.  I want to figure out how to heal.  I want to know whether I can handle more than one job and do both of them really, really well.

I can’t juggle.  But, the beautiful thing is, the only person who really expects that of me is me, and I can stop whenever I want.