The view from my office is beautiful. When there is sun, it beams through the west-facing windows, soaking me in warmth; I can enjoy the afternoon light and watch the sun set over the Olympics. Of course, I can only enjoy it when I turn away from my computer, which faces the wall.
Right now, I’m working more than I’ve ever worked in my life. I mean by sheer number of hours—I’m working more than I did in law school, and even in college, when I juggled classes and extracurriculars and research and part-time jobs with the boundless energy of a 19-year-old. Juggling, as it turns out, means you’re never holding one ball for very long. I would jump from task to task quickly, keeping everything in the air. I was the master of cramming before the test or writing an entire paper in a single night. I have always dealt on inspiration-flash—with all its finickiness, all its unreliability.
Now, I am an attorney. A real attorney! I like that lawyers can be either “lawyers” or “attorneys,” based primarily on what you feel like saying in the moment—yes, there is a technical distinction, but mostly the difference is sound. “Lawyer” is a soft angle; “attorney” is a blast of knocks. The choice between the two is a little splurge of poetry granted to people otherwise locked into strict definitions.
Do you know that, if you want, you can just look up the laws? They’re all out there. A lot of the questions I’m asked at work can be answered through Google. It’s just that nobody wants to try—and understandably so. A lot of my job is actually, painstakingly, reading line by line through a massive statute, or a massive legal document, or a massive number of cases that nobody else wants to read.
It’s not laziness—it’s that nobody is trained to read these texts. This is the nature of our legal system. Yes, laws are more confusing than they need to be, but to be fair, it’s just complicated to write a set of rules for human behavior that covers every possible angle and loophole. Laws are complex in an attempt to be comprehensive—yet it’s impossible to reach a truly objective account of human reality. I’m always dealing with some situation that isn’t covered by the law, situations where you have to apply things creatively, to interpret, to guess.
In a way, this is what I was trained to do in law school. I was trained to read legal texts and to extrapolate. Cases, for instance, which start out as terrifying black boxes, eventually become legible once you actually sit down and force yourself to read them, sentence by sentence, word by word. There’s no magic. It’s just mechanical work and process. You read the same case over and over until you understand it. You read case after case after case after case until it starts to get easier. Then, when someone asks you to read some horrible water rights case from the midcentury and explain it, you can do it, even though it sucks. You just work through it—sentence by sentence. Word by word.
Once, a professor of mine told us, “If you came to law school straight out of college, you have an advantage, because your brain is still plastic and it can adjust easier to a new way of thinking.” (At this, I smiled, pleased with my life choices.) “But there is a disadvantage, which is that, eventually, the plastic will set—and you’ll have lawyer brain forever.” (Panic.)
Now, my full-formed neon-pink plastic lawyer brain is perfectly ridged to fit the mold of the law. The words flow through the channels and tributaries of my mind in a stream of sound. Unlike reading for pleasure, where images and the meanings fall off the page, reading legal texts is a waiting game. You just have to keep looking until it starts to make sense. And, in my job, you have to be looking at it, or be actively synthesizing and analysing and writing about it, for at least eight concentrated hours of work a day—billed in six-minute increments. That doesn’t count meal breaks, bathroom breaks, staring at the ceiling in exhaustion, having a conversation with a coworker, doing the sudoku, checking Instagram or any other aspect of being alive. You bill each six-minute increment that you spent staring at a legal text, waiting for it to coalesce into meaning.
Suffice it to say… this job requires a lot of attention. It requires intense focus. It burns through brain cells. And when I’m done, which I almost never feel like I am, because there’s always more to do, it is a hard sell to choose to focus on something difficult, to read a challenging book or watch a challenging movie. I find myself, first of all, not wanting to read or look at a screen at all. My off-work hours have become more and more wordless and embodied: I gravitate towards eating meals in restaurants, going for walks, sitting outside, meeting up with friends, going to concerts—talking, exercising, going dancing—anything where I can focus my eyes on another person’s face, feel my body existing in space…
Everything is about momentum. If I’ve been working all day, I can roll straight into an evening activity. If I’ve already billed one hour, it’s easier to bill another. Last night I stayed up until 1 am working while watching TV because I was actually having fun; as my reward, I don’t have to work over the weekend. Yippee! These days, I’m not bound by work hours, but by hours worked—which can extend, boundaryless, into evenings and weekends and holidays, as much as I give it. My attention is literally being monetized. But unlike social media, where attention is stolen and monetized without reward… at least I am making some money off it. And at least my attention is sort of special. I have some expertise. I have skills to barter and trade.
And, oh yes, as it turns out, I do have an evil little consumerist inside of me, as well as a little spendthrift; making more money than I’ve ever made before, I suddenly find myself growing cheaper, making more food at home and opting for the free coffee in the office. As a server, I always wondered why rich people were the cheapest—why the biggest tabs always stiffed me, while other workers tipped 50%. Then, once I started making money, I caught myself in a moment of unconscious stinginess, thinking, do I really have to tip every time for a drip coffee? and it startled me. Maybe the Christians are right. Maybe our unconscious selves really do tend towards stingy, petty greediness—and any moral good requires constant, conscious correction. In my case, I reminded myself that one of the whole points of making money is that you get to be generous with it. But it made me understand the stingy rich phenomenon; it’s not exactly that they are uniquely evil people, they’re just being pulled along by the subterranean forces of money, that little miser in your head that, as soon as it has some, wants to hoard its dollars like a dragon coveting its gold.
At the same time, my little consumerist has me growing in desire for new objects—for instance, fancy, brand-new, brand-name shoes—I did that the other day, I walked straight past the Nordstrom Rack and directly through the gates of Nordstrom, where I found artfully-placed single shoes sitting on round tables. I did not know how to try the shoes on; they were not my size, and there was only one of each. I awkwardly asked one of the employees, “where do I go, to try on the shoes?” and he blinked at me and said, “that’s what I’m for.” I pointed out my choices, and he went into a back room and brought them out to me in my size. Then he sat there watching me while I tried them on, and he told me they all looked great on me, and I bought two pairs.
It was very strange. I tried hard not to make it uncomfortable, because I guess if your job is to go get people, who have extra money to spend, different sizes of shoes from the back room, the only thing worse than doing it for obnoxious, rub-it-in-your-face rich people might be doing it for self-hating rich people who make a big deal out of feeling guilty about it. It’s not a big deal. That’s just the format of the department store; there’s nothing degrading about it unless you make it degrading. But my discomfort persists. I am not used to being on this side of the counter.
This disconnect is something I experienced in law school. All my life, I identified with the workers around me. My family was the last generation of truly middle-class Americans, just rich enough to live in our own house and take our own vacations, just poor enough to bury ourselves in debt in the process. As a teenager and young adult, I was a server, a retail worker, a barista. And all my friends were, too. In fact, it was my server friends who were most excited for me when I got into law school. Then I actually got to law school, and the reality was this: I wasn’t identified with the servers or the cafeteria workers anymore; they hardly looked at me; their eyes sort of glazed over when I smiled at them or tried to chat, I was just another law student passing through. Yet I also struggled to relate to the fifth-generation attorneys in my Property class. I felt misplaced, out-of-step. I wasn’t quite sure where I belonged.
Do I fit with the lawyers at my firm yet? I’m not sure. First of all I’m not married, which everyone else seems to be, and when I tell people I live with roommates, they are politely surprised. My clothing is still cheap—I’m wearing H&M slacks and blazers from Ross. I don’t know how to tell the difference between what I’m wearing and what other people are wearing, but I bet there are other people who do—who notice and who care about my black sneakers or my shaggy haircut or the cheap pants that are a little too big on me. Who knows? I haven’t fully assimilated yet, so the social mores are still somewhat opaque. I don’t know when I’m putting my foot in my mouth til I’m tasting my toes.
What I do know is that a lot of other lawyers at my firm are extremely friendly, generous, and kind people, who are good attorneys and who want to be good human beings. And that’s what I want, too.
Yesterday I billed 9.2, yippee! I did not do much else, and when I was done, I sat down to write, only to feel that my brain was as smooth and hard as a pebble. I rolled it around in my head for a while, looking out the window. What did I have to say? I had spent the entire day filling my brain with other people’s words. And they weren’t words that were inspiring or generative or creative. They were dead, lifeless, sentence-ending words. Figures, data, columns, technical memorandum. All of that reading had eventually enabled me to write a decent legal memo, plus the beginning of a brief, and a few emails communicating important information to important members of important teams who were writing other important legal documents. I did a good job, I was fully lawyering. But that was all I was being. I did not exist in any other dimensions during that time. I have to commit to the romanticized idea of this job, because if I don’t, all that time is simply lost; it’s being poured into an empty container. It’s being soaked up like water on sand.
But after a while, the words started to come. The goal is to find the quiet that allows you to shift from rigid left-brain analysis mode to flowy right-brain pre-intellectualism. They are, in some ways, diametrically opposed. Poetry, for instance, is an attempt to break language. But lawyering is building language up, brick by brick, into a tower of impenetrable logic. After work, I frequently purge words onto the page, trying to exercise my capacity for strangeness, trying to produce words that would never, in a billion years, appear in a legal memorandum.
At the same time, these two forms of writing are not altogether different. The work ethic, and the discipline, that I am developing by being expected to work so many hours a day is flowing into my artistic pursuits. I am learning how to dedicate myself to a project through sheer number of hours. And the number of words I am writing per day is truly insane. It must be in the hundreds or thousands on average. That is, certainly, a form of training. It’s practice.
And, maybe because I am not living my life in a constant flux of intuitive, dynamic, do-whatever-you-want-ism, where everything becomes sort-of-the-same, the free moments that I do have feel bursting. I don’t want to spend my precious free time scrolling or watching YouTube videos or zoning out. I want to read, to see my friends, to live, and to write—and I do, and I have been—fiction, poetry and essay, though most of it I am saving to publish elsewhere, not sharing here. And my 2024 reading list has already exceeded 2023 in both scope and quality.1
My roommate, X, and I work at the same firm, and we are both artists. We’ve navigated these challenges together and are wiggling our way into meeting expectations at work while also preserving our souls. Right now, that looks like seeking discipline and routine so that we can close the work computer, mentally drive into the sunset, and try to make some art.
I guess one thing that I have discovered in writing this post is that I’m actually doing a better job of this than I’m giving myself credit for. When so much of your life becomes consumed with work, it’s easy to feel like other things are slipping; to feel like chores, and relationships, and art pursuits are balls you’re juggling in the air, never quite touching all at once. The stuff that feels like life becomes the optional, rotating cast of characters, while work expands to sit more and more solidly in the front cortex of your brain. It’s a deadbeat boyfriend taking you away from your exciting, dynamic friends. And it’s true—it’s hard to have it all. But when I look at how much I’ve written since I started working, I feel proud and excited for what comes next.
If there’s one thing I know I need to fight, it’s the urge to speed up, the spinning-out-of-control sense of the world that is induced from frantic, undisciplined work. As solutions—certainly meditation, less social media—but also I think I need to read more poetry—poetry, whose main goal is to be read slowly, to be savored, to be tasted. The goal of poetry is not to finish the poem or to burn through a book. It’s not to meet a goal or satisfy an expectation. It’s to experience a moment, fully; it’s having a state of consciousness induced in you, for a moment; it’s simulating a way of being.
Work, too, is a way of being. It’s a way of being that can be interesting and exciting and deep—or exhausting, and numbing, and hard. The goal is to experience work as something satisfying and real while also preserving the other ways of being. The goal is to expand—never to narrow. To experience it all. And to try—to try, as hard as you can, to make something new.
See, e.g., Pure Colour by Sheila Heti; Ways of Seeing by John Berger; The Divided Self by R.D. Laing; Madame Bovary, omg omg omg; the obsessively gorgeous new translations of the Lispector short stories; and, naturally, Nietzsche. Someday I will manage to write something coherent about Nietzsche, though the day has not yet arrived.
For more on work as a way of being, with all its complications, see one of my favorite Substacks, The Laboring Heart.
Beautifully written and food for thought. Thank you.
Love this look into your world and your beautiful brain. Thanks for writing it...