Hi, ye with whom I spent 1-3 years depending on your class. I write this to you as a kind of apology - an apology for not being as invested in you as you wanted to be invested in me. Looking back, it's clear all the chances at strong friendships I threw away for not knowing what I was doing as a human. I missed out on the best of some amazing people because I was floundering in myself. If I could substitute 2014 me for 2006-2009 me, I would love to, but time is not so kind.
I arrived at UA a confident 20-year-old and left a nervous, scared 23-year-old. Several things factored in, most of which boiled down to being unprepared for marriage and life after college in general. I discovered my Seasonal Affective Disorder in my second year and I was depressed most of my time in law school and its root cause wasn't discovered until late 2010. These things didn't help. But there was weird stuff too. Despite being a lawyer, I'm still intimidated by anyone who looks like a lawyer - and as the bulk of my class was 3-6 years older than me, they looked far more like a lawyer than I did - and I let the curve, the image, the everything get to me. You all looked like you were going to have great careers. I looked like I had no idea how I got there, because by that point I had no idea how I got there. In my mind I had become a failed prospect - the Brien Taylor of law school, I guess - and I look back in wonder as to how I scraped by, including passing the bar exam with the minimum score (as I did most non-seminar classes - I'm probably one of the few students to have a Best Paper and graduate in the bottom 10%).
It took a year to find a law job that would hire me full-time and that was only because it had gone full-time since the initial call and only 3 of the initial applicants were as available as I was. I wound up liking antitrust/class action document review - from 2010-early 2014 undiagnosed allergies kept me from working outside my home consistently, so remote stuff was necessary. But while they liked me, it wasn't steady work. I worked about 7 months in 2011 and 6 in 2012; this year is my first over 1800 hours across jobs, and I have 3 of them right now to pay back taxes and student loans. It looks like very good odds that I will be hired this week as a Legislation Editor for the City of Seattle based off my last 2 years of municipal codification lawyering; it's technically a paralegal position but is the same pay as my law work and virtually the same actual work (revising executive and legislative proposals to be worded correctly and training other departments to draft legislation right the first time). It would be my first permanent job with benefits.
I see my friends' online profiles and they still look as lawyerly as I don't. In general, their path seems to have been as straightforward as going to a Tier 1 law school implies - get in with a firm and do lawyer things for lawyer money. And the others tend to have a heartwarming story about embracing what they love. I love working with municipal legislation, but that's not heartwarming; I'll have attorneys for bosses, not colleagues.
Maybe the law school would be embarrassed to know that they'd paid for my first year just to end up here. Maybe the law school alumni would be embarrassed too. It's the life I've got, and I enjoy it, but from the perspective of those 3 arduous years in the aughts I feel like I wasted so much. Maybe I could have made your lives better in some way. I don't know.
In any event, I miss you all, I hope you're doing splendidly, and I wish I could have been as wonderful to you as you deserve. If I run into you now, I'll try to make up for lost time.
Brandon Isleib
University of Alabama Law School
Class of 2009
earthdyedred at gmail
Sunday, December 7, 2014
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)