I was doing some stuff shifting. Amazing that I have only been in this apartment for just under two years, but I have managed already to forget where I have things, or I notice a box, and wonder what I put in it. I found in one box a reflection from November 1982. The wondering was about why I ever became a lawyer in New York and why having moved to California I was working to take the California Bar and be admitted on the West Coast as well. Lots of things hadn't happened for me yet. I hadn't returned to the Catholic Church yet. I was by then 12 years lapsed. I hadn't found a niche for myself, as an attorney in New York and a potential one in Los Angeles, and I was then pining and vaguely working (clearly not hard enough) to become a television writer. I was working in a very small law office as a secretary pending passage of the Bar, and doing some research and lots of client handholding. I had already discovered both in New York and in California that the pontifications about THE LAW writ large, just like the pontifications about pretty much any institution or activity, just did not accord with the reality. I was looking for the pure--which would become a large subject of therapy when I began it in 1990--and in not finding it, I was becoming very anxious. Or should I say, I was becoming more anxious than usual.
So here were my thoughts at the tender age of 28.
(My boss) asked me today why I had decided to become an attorney. It's a question which I have never liked because I've honestly had no answer--not even one for myself. It probably had something to do with my parents egging me on (my mother really) to things educational, philosophical, analytical, and linguistic. While the reason was never articulable, it was always a definite unswerving goal. Even unswerving when I thought I might also like to be in the entertainment industry.
(The boss) went on to confirm verbally what I've come to know and be disturbed about--that to survive in this law business, it is necessary to "stretch" one's ethics. A disquieting reality which is more disquieting once reiterated by yet another long practicing attorney.
It jolts me, makes me afraid, and insecure, and guilty. In my soul I know I cannot continue in this field. Intellectually, and once again, realistically, I also know I may have no real choice. This, as they say, is all that I am prepared for. The finding of options is never easy. The taking of options even less so. Poor Pollyanna! I'm not really a Pollyana but I cannot deny my gut feeling that if I pursue what I feel is wrong it will wither me early on. It would be a case of not being true to oneself and a defiance of Polonius' best advice.
My father believes me to be a fool to spend so much time to become something and then have the desire to give it up. Wasn't that something I should have investigated before I invested time? You cannot investigate in advance what the practice of law will be like. College does not prepare you for it. Law school is strictly, in my opinion, an academic exercise that minimizes what it should maximize, the clinical, the stark reality of day to day paperwork, filing, nasty clients, nastier adversaries, deadlines, lies, delays. The law in any substantive sense takes a back seat.
Given my background and attitudes I could not know this before I began the pursuit. I've said it before. I don't regret the decision to study the law. It will always be a part of my make up, my intellectuality, if you will, and I probably can use it somewhere, but I might regret staying with its official practice. Becoming an integral member of this club might cost me dearly. A denial of myself. A denial of what I have believed in.
And what do I believe in? Pinning that down itself becomes less easy as the years pass and as the incongruities loom large and answers are nowhere to be found--or worse, when the answers are there but I have no time to look for them.
I was raised, at least nominally, a Catholic. I went to Catholic School. I was drilled in dogma. I tried to go to Church. And I believed in a basic morality. There were good things to do. And bad things you didn't do. You didn't cheat. You didn't lie. You didn't steal. You listened to the teachers. And you believed in God. The Catholic God.
I've been out of Catholic school a long time. My parents had no specific religious conviction so there was no pressure for me to follow the institutional line once I left high school. I cannot really remember the dogma, other than "Who created me?" God created me. I still have the residual influence though, a strong residual influence, that peculiarly I don't want to fade. There are good things to do. And bad things that you don't do. You don't cheat. You don't Either lose yourself in a rigid, artificially constructed institutional religion, waiting for the world to destroy itself and taking no responsibility for events and people, or you reject God, man, right, wrong, anything, and act according to worst possible instincts. I don't want to float. I don't want to be controlled. Leaving another question. What do I want?
People are so willing to disprove the existence of God. I still want to find Him. The Bible, say every religious group in every shape and variety and translation and interpretation--He's in there somewhere. Looking to places, religions and words--these to not seem to be where God would bother to be.
I wanted and still want to believe that the law allows for morality. But I've read much that says morality has no place in the law. I have never agreed with this. The law ostensibly protects rights. Rights cannot exist without reason, in a vacuum. A person has rights because of some basic premise. Protection of a society is a reason, but hardly the reason to defend one man unto death, or through every court. It's a basic sense of a Must. A feeling of THIS MUST BE.
What upsets me about myself is that while I have beliefs, I don't have conviction. I can be swayed. By fear. By pressure of opinion. My father often say that I was raised wrong, that I should have been taught to play poker. He means that literal and in a way to deal with people, to be able to play hard ball. Tough minded in the ways of the world. Understanding how to wheel and deal.
I respect my father. And I understand his thought. After all I'm in a profession where these attitudes go without saying. On the other hand I recall that he behaved I less than nasty ways when he dealt wit others. It's just not built into either of us. He's not happy about it. I am. I just wish I could follow through. Wanting to be ethical is not a weakness. It's just looked upon as one.
I'm not quite ethical. I want to be more ethical. And I certainly don't want to be less so. And as I travel the path that I have thus far, I fear the chances for maintaining ethics lessen daily. It disturbs me. Saps my strength.
I started to write more after this, but something must have interrupted me, and I did not complete the further thought.
I began to investigate my faith again, not long afterward. I have changed perspectives on what is and is not the fullness of faith and I believe that Catholicism has it. I struggle still to separate the Message from the messengers. And I have the same tendency with everyone else to throw away the Message because the messenger is sometimes so foul in behavior. But I have also learned that being foul in behavior is something we all share from time to time, the result of our still fallen natures. Redemption restored a relationship, not our natures. And we must fight our natures daily. I must fight my nature daily. And it seems that God is giving me the Graces I need, sometimes despite my resistance and petulance.
I found a few years later the only thing I could do as an attorney, working for the State Bar as, you might have guessed or knew if you know me, as an ethics attorney. There are no accidents with God. On balance its lesser moments were much outweighed by the good work my colleagues and I did, but like everything else, it was tinged, tainted let's say, with egos abounding and a failure sometimes to do what was best in favor of doing what the voice du jour demanded. Or pretending to. When I was fired from that job, along with a number of other managers, in a "change of direction" I knew I would never practice law again. I keep the licenses active but only because I worked so darn hard to get them. An ethics attorney was what I was cut out to be if I were to remain an attorney, as I did. Been there. Done that.
I still don't know why I became an attorney, exactly. But it was meant to be, I am sure. What I will be henceforward is still in development. But attorney at law for me now is a past activity with a present nostalgic title.
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