"1L is the hardest."

-- By CeciliaPlaza - 14 Apr 2018

1L year has forced me to get to know myself—something I have long been afraid to do.

I started small: I learned that I can schmooze with the best of them and that I fit into this world better than I expected to. I’ve found that I hate schmoozing and don’t want to fit into this world as much as I expected to. But somewhere along the way, and somewhat against my will, I discovered something that actually matters.

Getting Out

My entire life has been about “getting out.”

I wasn’t going to get pregnant and married during or right after high school. I wasn’t going to go to aim for community college believing I should feel lucky I made it that far. I wasn’t going to let the abuses, the indignities, the unfairness of my circumstances dictate what I could and could not do. I wasn’t about to accept so low a bar.

But stubbornness is not enough to make it “out” of those traps. My parents always supported my hopes and dreams, but they were honest. Dreams are expensive. I either needed to think bigger or dream smaller. So, I sought out the resources. As soon as I was legally old enough, I started working, and saving. I found people who would invest in me. And I got “out.”

I never thought to ask myself where I wanted to go once I was “out”—and no one ever asked me. No one ever asked me anything.

They told me.

Told me what I needed to do and how I needed to do it. Told me that if I was going to be anything, I needed to be the best, because everyone else already had a head start.

The "best" at what?

First, I thought that meant academics, so I worked hard and earned myself the scholarships I needed to get to a fancy college with a good reputation.

Once I got there, academics was no longer felt like enough. So, I got research grants, volunteered, led school organizations, fundraised for local women’s shelters, served on student government, worked as a residential advisor, worked a minimum-wage job… I lived four years of my life just short of my breaking point, trying to convince the people around me—and more so, myself—that I belonged, that I could keep up, that I could be the “best.”

And it killed me that everyone at home was so proud. They didn’t know that all this time I had just been a big fish in a little, poorly resourced pond. Now, here, in this world, I was a plankter.

Getting In

Then, I got into Columbia-a reach school among my reach schools. Ironically, coming to law school, where I feel more out of place than I have ever felt, is the closest I've come to understanding myself. I don’t think myself a plankter anymore.

The "best" in context

1L year has put “best” in context for me. Being the “best” lawyer I can possibly be is about having a mission, a purpose beyond escaping something and proving people wrong. It means leaving this world just a little bit better than it was when I entered it—leaving a net-positive impact.

Every stage of my life has shown me just how ugly, how cruel, how depraved people can be, and how many forms injustice can take. I am tired. I am hurt. I am aggrieved. But I have been looking for reprieve in the wrong places. Until now, I did not know that I could be that reprieve, however small.

1L year has been about choices. I have choices now, and whatever I choose to do, I will make that choice because I believe in its potential for net-positivity. For light. For reprieve.

I choose to be the kind of lawyer who brings others up with me despite the intense individualistic culture we’re drowning in (because what a sad life it would be to get wherever it is you’re going and find yourself alone).

I choose not to be the center of my own world.

I choose, for the first time, to walk towards something.

How?

I came to law school with plans, with an end-goal, but my newly discovered vision for myself—a net-positive me—requires living in real time. As much as it pains me, a risk-averse control freak who has always had an escape plan, being the “best” kind of lawyer requires not having a 30-year plan. It means being okay with not knowing.

I can become the kind of lawyer I hope to be only by not planning. Not the way I used to, at least. I have outgrown every plan for my life that I ever made. It is time to make room for opportunities, for the kinds of choices I say I want to make. I have been pigeon-holing myself.

I just need to have faith that I will end up where I need to be, and where I am needed. My only “plan,” per se, is to trust myself to make choices driven by purpose rather than fear. I already have everything I need.

I have passion. Grit bordering on stubbornness that so often comes back to bite me but is also the reason I haven’t given up in the face of so many reasons to do so. Love. Practical skills and the intelligence to use them appropriately. A story that lights a fire in me. A tiny spark of naiveté that I recognize as one of my greatest weaknesses, but that keeps me hopeful.

I have direction. I have a reason.

The kind of lawyer I hope to be is going to find my own way of doing something good—because God knows, something good must come of this. And if I’m as stubborn as I think I am, something good will.

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