Category Archive

I hate making decisions. I just can’t do it. The though of making a final call on something that will occur in the future, over which I honestly have absolutely no control, scares me frozen.

So thus here I am neurossing again because I can’t sleep.

Gah.

Some of the ‘emotional turmoil’ (for want of a better, less stuck-up term) I’ve been going through in the last few months has been about my job and, more generally, about where I am going with my life.

At the end of law school, I applied for (and was eventually successful in obtaining) employment as a graduate lawyer in a top-tier commercial law firm.  It should have been all pretty amazing.  My fellow graduands were in quite a tizz about applications and interviews and blah dee blah.  Most were wined and dined by top firms hoping to recruit the best.

But I basically pulled myself out of the process the year before, when I didn’t bother applying for the usual 3-5 vacation clerkships, and when I took the one clerkship I did get and ran with them, as a 1-day-a-week Research Assistant in my final year.  I was basically part of the family by the time it came to applying for graduate jobs, and I didn’t bother applying for some places because I knew they would look at me as ‘taken’, and one of the two other places where I did apply did just that.

The other place?  I pulled out.  I was so scared about having to make a decision between two places that I just went, nope. I’m here now, I’ll stick with it.  I just didn’t feel as if I had the capacity to make such a big decision.

I’ve done this before.  At the end of high school, after working my tiny little arse off for 5 years, I could have had the choice between law school and med school.  But I ran away from the choice, by just leaving myself with the choice of which law school to go to.  I suppose, by doing that, I really did make a choice, i.e. Go To Law School, but what I’m trying to say is that I hate making choices.  I freak out at them.  Because somehow I feel incapable of respecting my ability to make the right choice.

Probably because I often wondered if I made the right choice in regards to which law school to go to.

But I now wonder if I chose the wrong fork in the Med/Law intersection.

A study last year found that lawyering is the most depressed professional field in Australia, so it looks like I’m about to add to that little statistic.

Not that I’m saying that by choosing med school, I wouldn’t be depressed.  Because that choice wouldn’t change my genetics, or my family, or any of the other causes of my current state of emotional-being.  I guess I’m just wondering if I should have done law.

In my first session last week, Dr H asked me why I chose law.  Blank look.  “I don’t know.  I’ve always wanted to do law.”  “But why have you always wanted to do law?”  Shrug. 

I could never answer that question truthfully in interviews, either.  Here’s one I prepared earlier: “I love solving problems and being challenged.  I know, obviously, that there are many fields in which I could be challenged and solve problems, but I like the idea that as a lawyer, you solve problems that people have in the day to day life in Real World.  Those problems might be about their business or a relationship or about their actions, depending on which field of law you’re in, but they are still everyday, real problems, and I think that helping to solve them through the law is an interesting and fulfilling career path.”

What a load of cock.  Anyway, they fell for it.

I am clearly conflicted by all these lies and deceptions.

I used to want to save the world when I was younger, and I think that was a reason I put in my law school application letter.  There’s a group of Facebook called “Law School: Where Idealism Goes to Die”, and I couldn’t concur with the accuracy of that statement more. 

Sometimes I still want to do that (save the world) but I don’t think I’m strong enough to do that anymore.  (Like my psychological analysis said, I don’t have delusions.)  But there’re all these thoughts I have about the fact that I have proved myself to be being a very capable person, and from values that have been instilled in me from my family, I feel as if I should do something with that capacity, for other people, for the world.  But, back to the top of this paragraph: I don’t think I can do anything.  And I freak.

This quote from Professor Geoff Gallop pretty much sums up my problem (at least on this issue):

The guilt that depressives feel in the face of their and the world’s many imperfections also works against their own liberation. They want to please and isn’t everything that happens their responsibility and theirs alone? The more they do, the more they have to do. It is for others that they act and it is to achieve at the highest levels that they work beyond reason. To do otherwise - and to put themselves and their well-being first — is to fail the test of life that has been created in their own minds. Herein lies the problem for many of our professionals and high achievers — they have lost control. 

That which drives them also has the potential to destroy them and, tragically, all too often it does. As Dr Mamta Gautam said of the legal profession in her Tristan Jepson Memorial Lecture last year: “These personality traits are all very socially and professionally valuable, but personally very expensive”. [link]

So  I went to law school, and then I finished it.  Mind you, I took as long as possible to finish it, because I think I knew I didn’t want to actually Do Law, but then when I did, I was faced with another horrible crisis of confusion.

The big step towards the Big Bad Legal Jungle is not an easy one to take.  Which is why I have actually pussy-footed around in front of it.  I haven’t taken the leap yet.  I dipped my toe in, waved to the people on the other side, and then said, “just wait a sec, I’ll be rightback,” as I walked along on the edg.   I deferred my graduate position and took a 12-month job, which is still in law but not as a law grad.   The Firm were totally fine with it, because it’s a fancy-schmancy job, and it makes me an even better graduate to have in their troop.

This job is my way of justifying going to law school without having to be a lawyer, because I wasn’t ready for that at the end of last year.  I thought the holiday M and I took would refresh me and prepare me but I’m still not ready.  I hate this job.  It is so boring.  I am not being challenged, I do not like it.  Plus. My boss scares the hell out of me (he’s a male Miranda Preistly, I am not kidding, and sometimes he calls out to my co-worker and all I can think of is Merryl Steep going “Emmilyyy” in that deep, low, scary voice).

I should be going to work for another fellow soon, and I know I will suck it up and not just quit, but what I am now wondering about is whether I should go to The Firm next year.  Because it will probably be worse. 

I don’t know.  Obviously I should cross that bridge when I come to it, but I’d really like to be prepared for dealing with the Troll.

There’s an idea that I’ve been thinking about for the last few weeks, which I think is probably pretty stupid, but this post is way too long so I’ll look into it later.

I couldn’t sleep last night.  I tried, because I had bootcamp this morning (and I have missed the last two sessions due to my technical ineptitude/stupidness at setting calendar alarms on my mobile) and I was meant to get up at 5:30. I did get up and go and bootcamp-it-up, mind you, but I struggled to sleep and now I am struggling to stay awake.

My legs were aching, I couldn’t get comfortable, my tummy was upset. (Aw, tummy-wummy’s got a boo-boo? And no one to kiss it beddow? Aw!) There goes that darn Somatiziwhatsit, all acting up again. 

Plus. 

There were so many ideas smashing around in my head. So many thoughts about yesterday’s session, an email I got from my dad, my goals, things I’ve gotta do in the next few days.  It’s been a while since this’s happened to me.  Maybe that’s a good sign?  That I’m more motivated and excitable? Or maybe it bad cause it’s like my craaaazy mania or stress.

Urgh.

Ok, so, my brain is mush these days. I keep forgetting stuff I need to do so I write things I have to do in a bunch of different places on a billion scraps of paper, but never have the right bit of paper to remind me to do stuff when that thing could be done, and so I forget to do it and freak about it later, resulting in my having yet another thing to be upset about.

Le sigh.

So, I decided to get organised.  I was inspired by a bunch of blogs all talking about this ‘GTD‘ task management thing:

[Getting Things Done] rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks. What distinguishes GTD from other time- or action-management systems is the idea of grouping tasks by the context (defined as a place or set of available resources) in which they are to be performed.

There are lots of ways of GTD-ing, apparently, and I spent many a geeky blog-surfing hour looking at them.  The ideas that impressed me most included using a Moleskine (because I heart Moleskines) and regular old index cards (aka an Hipster PDA) but I ended up making up a system that melds a few of them together. 

I got a cute new pocket Moleskine, hacked [literally] out tabs in the pages, highlighted the tabs and edges and clipped a bunch of index cards to the front with a fat phat Mori Clip and then stuck in some planner pages from D*I*Y Planner.

“Uh. Wait. Why don’t you just use your diary?”, my friend A asked when she saw me with it, knowling full well that I already have one, which just happens to be a Molskine softcover weekly planner notebook.

Because it’s got extra features.  That I put in myself because I knew how I wanted to organise myself.  So nyah.

“I think you do more organising that actual doing,” M said to me when he saw it.

Yeah, he’s probably right.