The Shine Has Worn Off...

In other words, I'm finding law school frustrating. Not so much hard-frustrating, like you'd think it would be, the kind you could overcome with a healthy attitude toward a challenge. No, this is more of a mind-numbing frustration in which it becomes increasingly impossible to hold my focus. Trying to concentrate after you've been in law school all day is sort of like trying to walk on a foot that's fallen asleep. In part, I think this is due to the fact that first-year classes are notoriously dry and generic, and I get that. While I don't like it, I get it. What bothers me more is the atmosphere. While at first I was genuinely impressed by my classmates' accomplishments, and felt like there was a healthy spirit of community activism among us, that sense is being replaced by a creeping pessimism that the motivation behind these accomplishments may have had less to do with concerns for social justice than with admissions and resumes. I know, call me jaded, I can take it...It's not that I don't have or haven't had those concerns as well, because everybody does. It's just that I look at the people a year or two further along than I am and it seems increasingly like they're all flocking down a path I don't want any part of. I don't want to spend all my time wearing heels, kissing "the partners' " asses, and spouting big firm lingo; I feel like those things are the antithesis of why I went to law school, and they feel like big red flags telling me I'm going in the wrong direction.

I knew this disconnect was likely, and I probably should have realized it was inevitable, because I knew from the beginning that I don't want to be "a Lawyer." I want to be....whatever I end up being, with the added benefit of a law degree. The road to getting there is just starting to feel longer and lonelier. And I miss, with painful clarity, the world of nursing, where I never had to worry about being bored or feeling like my job mattered--if I was doing it right, I knew with certainty that it did. I certainly had P L E N T Y of other things to worry about, as all nurses do, but those two things were never concerns. Between that and the rape crisis line and Big Brothers Big Sisters, I guess I may have taken those elements of my life for granted, when now I'm realizing that they're far from a lock. To realize at the end of the day that you've spent 8 hours or more doing something that has had absolutely no impact on anybody whatsoever, and that you were bored out of your mind doing it, is a very sobering realization about how you spend your time.

Anyway. I work this weekend, which should be somewhat refreshing in that respect, and I've made contact with someone else at school who's interested in the same types of sexual assault and law related issues that I am, and we're hoping forge some sort of meaningful connection with some organizations here since there aren't any existing in the school right now. And I know that this is just a means to an end; I'll get through it, I'll find classes and activities that are meaningful to me, and then I'll get out and things will get better.

They're just getting me down right now.

graphic from www.art.com