No Way Out

There was a session today for people who are interested in becoming admissions volunteers (of which I am one), which of course made me think back on the strange road that brought me to law school. 

I was pretty confused about what I wanted to do for graduate school, perhaps in part because I never had the conviction that I think one needs for a Ph.D. and because I had no experience in the law at all. So either option seemed both appealing and incomprehensible. Looking back it would have been hard for me to do the doctorate or to progress efficiently beyond it because I think I lack that intuitive, all-seeing nature of the humanities professor, but it's impossible to say that for certain.

I do remember that when I got the big envelope from this law school, I immediately thought Well shit, now it's all been decided for me. I'm still not sure why I thought that first - possibly so that if I felt unhappy about the decision, I could claim that it was out of my hands. A more charitable interpretation might be that it was just my cynical brain reworking a gut reaction that I just had to go to law school. But I'm a little too jaded to see it that way.

I was talking to one of my classmates yesterday about law school and the reasons of doing it, probably because we both have ambivalence about the entire endeavor. I remarked that since my sister dropped out of law school after her first year and much of my family position is based on my intellectual superiority to her (a fact I'm not proud of at all), it was impossible for me to ever drop out of law school - if only to maintain my role in the family. That's not a good reason, of course; nor is it the only one. And it's not as though I feel that I would love to drop out, except that I'm barred from that because of my weird family hangups. I'm actually pretty happy in school so far, I think.

The issue, I suppose, is that the fact that I was going to some sort of post-graduate program felt predestined (because of my parents' perspective); the fact that I was going to end up in law school over English also felt predestined (because of my pragmatism, among other things); and the fact that I am going to finish law school feels predestined (because of my fucked-up family perspective). The only thing that doesn't feel pre-destined is my relative success as a lawyer - and that's because that is all up to me and I can't blame it on anyone else if it ends up not playing out as I envision. So, as with all the decisions I just mentioned, it's my own damn fault regarding what does or doesn't happen. As I must always remind myself: I chose this. 

I knew that already so I'm not really sure why it took me six paragraphs to come to that point, but whatever.