Notes from Amsterdam Ave.

-- By KristenQuesada - 20 May 2025

Undone, Remade, Unmoored Again

I’ve survived the collapse of my reality before. My God, my politics, and my belief system I’d carried since the womb all gave way as I was becoming a young adult. That first collapse taught me that losing your identity can be a gift. I cast aside the meaning I inherited in exchange for one I forged myself.

I thought I’d already done the hard part. But now, in law school, my reality is breaking again. And this time, it’s not just internal. It’s a reckoning with the world itself. So, what happens when every anchor—God, country, and law—turns out to be myth?

The Halls Are Quiet

When I started Lawyerland, I assumed it was fiction. The conversations dripped with too much honest recognition of the legal system’s darkest edges for real lawyers to face so directly the horror of what they do every day. So imagine my shock and fear for my future as a lawyer when I learned it was all real: something had split in Jack, and Robinson had gone through a metamorphosis, maybe for the worse.

Tharaud speaks of the dimwits who “wake up in a ‘what-is-life-really-about?’ stupor” and realize too late that they missed the beauty of life. In 2025, that stupor has metastasized through a dying ego raging against time itself, screaming into the void not to be forgotten with every fascist pantomime. Tharaud’s advice? “Protect yourself, protect what you believe in, those whom you love.” But is that really enough, when your country is on a runaway spiral into authoritarianism, and you’re preparing to enter a profession that’s beginning to legitimize it?

A former constitutionalist, I used to believe in America’s slow arc of progress; that even through its flaws, it was devised to get better. Law school in the Trump Era, however, brought this pretense of our system into full relief. Our “law” firms bow to capital, our universities to state intrusion. We study the Constitution while that piece of paper is mocked in real time. Due process becomes theoretical when students are snatched in the night. The halls of justice I once romanticized do not, in fact, echo with righteousness. Instead, they are quiet. “Neutral.” Shameful.

The Nun I Never Was

Back when I was a Christian, I read the Gospels alongside Dostoevsky’s devout characters and didn’t understand why every believer didn’t forsake everything and become a monk, like Alyosha Karamazov. If you truly believed Christ’s teachings, how could you live any other way? I feel the same way now, looking at the law. If it’s not in service of justice, why practice it at all?

And yet, you’ll notice that I didn’t become a nun. “I am, after all, a lawyer. I am never far from evil.” To be a lawyer is to share the office, the courtroom, the deal sheet with evil. My father once asked why I read fiction—it wasn’t “real.” But fiction gave me something the law seems designed to erase: empathy. The chance to see through another’s eyes.

This profession asks me to live in someone’s shoes in a very different way: to be their mouthpiece, even when that client is destroying our planet or creating new domestic crises for one penny more. But my empathy lies with the people they harm. And that empathy—quiet, inconvenient, critical—is still the root of my notion of justice. I may have forsaken God as a concept, but I refuse to forsake the Gospel’s moral clarity.

The irony is, after all this reckoning, I’ll probably still go into Big Law, at least temporarily. The very system I’ve questioned, I’m poised to enter. The same institutions I’ve dismantled in theory still write the checks in practice. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite. Maybe it just makes me another soon-to-be lawyer trying to stay human in a machine built for something else. Or maybe I was never meant to be a nun.

When I chose law over Classics, I believed I was choosing action over passion. But in retrospect, that academic path was its own kind of monastery, a space where I could think deeply but remain untouched. Both Classics and Christianity once offered me purity through removal, a way to stay ethically clean by standing apart from the fray. But I’ve come to understand that integrity doesn’t only live in distance. It might live, too, in staying present, amid contradiction, compromise, and even complicity, without giving up the capacity to feel, to imagine, and to resist forgetting what justice feels like.

To Witness, Even Here

It was a lot easier to be a cynic as a Christian. When the world went wrong, God was still right. When a dictator won an election, this earth was only temporary. But now, under my current belief system, all we have is this. Institutions fail. Nations fall. And still, the sky is blue.

Maybe Tharaud is right, and all we can do with our short time on earth is witness others, help our neighbors, and follow the truths that stir in us. Or maybe Tharaud is just another lawyer, a “conscientious schizoid” who has learned to live divided, comfortably distant from consequence.

My greatest lesson from my original metamorphosis was that meaning isn’t handed down; it’s forged, piece by piece, through how we live (thank you, Sartre). I don’t need broken institutions to tell me who I am or what to do. For now, yes, I will likely enter Big Law, where meaning can be elusive and justice even more so: "I am, after all, a lawyer. I am never far from evil.” But I still believe it matters to see clearly, to choose consciously, and to hold onto a self that questions everything—even when it signs the contract.

My reality of law has broken, and I expect it will break again. I welcome that. Change is not collapse; it’s transformation. If my experience has taught me anything, it’s that no future is certain and no reality is fixed. Going forward, that truth is my foundation. Because freedom begins by knowing that another future is possible. And I’m willing to create the one I want to see.

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