Find work and a life beyond the billable hour.
Highly sensitive people (HSPs) perceive much higher levels of sensory input than the average person. This innate trait can make lawyering a difficult or miserable experience, unless you work in a highly supportive, collegial culture. Most legal environments are not that. If you suspect you’re an HSP lawyer, changing some aspect of your job is likely necessary.
What right do we former lawyers have to be bitter and unhappy? I mean, when at least half of attorneys surveyed say they would not choose law again, obviously nothing is wrong with the structure and culture of the profession. It’s—‘DOH!— our bad personal choice to go to law school that is to blame.
Even though depression and anxiety can paralyze you right now, don’t give up on your wild and precious self. Reach out for help and accountability.
Highly sensitive people (HSPs) perceive much higher levels of sensory input than the average person. This innate trait can make lawyering a difficult or miserable experience, unless you work in a highly supportive, collegial culture. Most legal environments are not that. If you suspect you’re an HSP lawyer, changing some aspect of your job is likely necessary.
What right do we former lawyers have to be bitter and unhappy? I mean, when at least half of attorneys surveyed say they would not choose law again, obviously nothing is wrong with the structure and culture of the profession. It’s—‘DOH!— our bad personal choice to go to law school that is to blame.
Even though depression and anxiety can paralyze you right now, don’t give up on your wild and precious self. Reach out for help and accountability.
I cannot keep track of, well, anything lately. Even though I don’t feel acutely stressed, my brain is shrieking (and performing) otherwise. This time of pandemic is somehow blowing all my brain circuits. I am mentally and emotionally wiped out. How about you?
People think there are so many reasons they should go to law school that do not include “I want to practice law.” It’s ridiculous, really. There’s a bizarre mythology that having a law degree is a magic key to the job kingdom, but it’s not so.
When no one knows how anything will turn out, you can feel freer to follow your inner wisdom without a cloud of guilt and doubt hanging over you. Your inner wisdom has always been more likely to be the right answer for you; now more than ever, you can free yourself from justifying the dreams borne of that inner wisdom.
Connect with whatever inspires you–the Indigo Girls, or something else altogether—and use that to dream big, and act big.
The legal industry as a whole must fix its fetish with perfection. In the end, calling out colleagues on their weaponized perfectionism benefits everyone, especially lawyers who are different from the norm. It doesn’t require money to address. You don’t need anyone’s permission. It’s a step you can take within the next week.
I’ll bet a wad of cash that you’re experiencing perfection expectations from either yourself, or your bosses. Likely both. Lawyers do love to pretend they can power through anything, and we have the depression, substance abuse, and suicide rates to prove it.
Instead, do your best to accept that you are living through a major, historic crisis, and that however it resolves, some things will never be the same.
I have spent the last couple days trying to write a fabulous post that will help all of y’all feel
People often mistake their thoughts and beliefs as actual truths. Yet it’s often not so. Our beliefs are not necessarily the gospel from on high, let alone the entire truth. But so many lawyers fervently believe that work can’t be fun, that they can’t make money doing something they love, or that they have no marketable skills aside from law.
Leaving the Law 