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Law in Contemporary Society
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Where Are You?-- By VanessaNguyen - 22 Feb 2024 I’m not sure exactly why this question made me cry. It was a simple question with a simple answer. I was sitting on the sixth floor of Jerome Greene Hall, at Columbia Law School, a place I longed to be. A place I had given up everything to come to. My family, friends, my old job back in California, all those things seemed so far from me now.What are you doing here?The simple answer is that I’m here learning the law and how to be a lawyer. The honest answer is that I’m here learning a lot about myself and who I want to be. The most important thing I’ve learned so far is that I’m devastatingly human. There’s something deeply uncomfortable about that realization for someone who’s lived their whole life trying to hide the worst parts of their humanity. It sounds stupid, but I’m still learning to be okay with that.How did you get here?I could never really know for sure why I got into Columbia, but I’d be willing to bet it was my solidly median GPA and slightly below median LSAT score. I didn’t have an amazing story to tell in my personal statement. My family had its fair share of struggles, but ultimately I never went hungry and I had a mostly happy childhood. To an admissions officer, I was probably just a very regular girl, and I don’t necessarily disagree with that. But I did have to work hard for the good grades and test scores that (presumably) got me here. Growing up as a first-generation meant that academically, I was on my own. It also meant that I was on my own when it came to the logistics of attending college. These were just minor obstacles that never deterred me. I got through it because of “grit” and “determination” and my ability to be a “self-starter”, and other words you might see on an Indeed job posting. All those traits, at least as they applied to me, might be better described as anxiety, or even neuroticism. The kind of people who go to Columbia Law School are the people who have always been the best at everything they did. From a young age, you get told you’re “gifted and talented” in elementary school. Maybe you were a high school valedictorian. You probably graduated summa cum laude, and you probably scored in or above the 95% percentile in every standardized test, including the LSAT. I’m no exception to this archetype. But my success in life might be a function of that fact that I’ve always been so afraid of failure. What better way to ensure that you don’t fail than to do everything in your power to be the best? Being the best was not the end I sought, it was merely the means to my end of not being a failure. Of course that’s an unhealthy mentality to have, but it was easy to ignore this fact when it was this attitude that resulted in me getting everything I wanted. I graduated from college with highest honors and got a well-paying, respectable job in economic consulting. I got into an Ivy League law school, gained the respect of my peers, and above all – I made my parents proud. And so I became the person that I thought I had to be to maintain this happiness. I had to do be a superhuman who could balance the demands of a career, work towards my goals of going to law school, and still be a likable and sociable person. Despite my laser-focus on achieving my goals, I always prided myself on being a good friend and a good person, but I never thought that this alone would gain the respect of my peers. I had to be a good AND successful person, hardworking but still fun-loving, intelligent, but never in an insufferable way. If I wasn’t also an impressive human being, who would care that I was a nice person? So what do you do when suddenly you’re a big fish in a small pond with lots of other big fish and you can’t help but notice that maybe you’re not the biggest fish? The traits that got me a seat at one of the best law schools in the country suddenly didn’t serve me too well anymore. The anxiety that stopped me from failing now manifested as a constant need to compare myself to others and wonder why I wasn’t good enough. How do you reconcile with the fact that parts of who you are don’t make you happy anymore? Not only did they not make me happy, but they actively contributed to the mental health decline that so often accompanies 1L year.Where do you go from here?The first step is to let go of the notion that my pain has to be profound to be worth speaking about. I hesitated writing about this topic because in many ways it feels incredibly unimportant. Tons of people are miserable, what makes my particular sadness worth putting out into the world? The second step is letting go of the fear that talking about your problems makes them more real. My sadness is real whether I put it on the paper or not. Part of this fear stems from the culture I grew up in; Asian families are notorious for shying away from conversations about emotions and mental health. I’ve always been good at talking to others about their feelings, but it’s considerably more difficult to talk about my own. After that, I’m not really sure. I think I need to give myself room for failure, and to understand that it’s okay not to be the absolute best as long as I try my best. Above all, it’s okay to be human, for my humanity is ultimately what ties me to my loved ones, and those connections bring me the happiness we all so desperately seek.This is a fine, brave first draft: it tells us what we are working on and it endows the writer with the power of honesty. The route to improvement—because this is an exercise in making the map by exploring the terrain—is to push further into the unknown. In an exercise like this, that means further into the unknown inside. We need to get within the atomic particles called "the best" and "failure." Unlike the life of the schoolchild, the life of the grownup doesn't have any use for best. All great lawyers are different, none is the best. All great marriages, or other relationships—Tolstoy to the contrary notwithstanding—are different, none is the best. If you have a best child, you are not the best parent. Money being a psychoactive substance, it is best to have enough. Either more or less than enough is destructive. But only one can know for oneself what is enough. No one else knows best. Failure is an attribute of human relationship, or else—as Ambrose Bierce defines "accident" in The Devil's Dictionary—an "inevitable occurrence owing to the operation of immutable natural laws." If your children know you think they've failed, then your relationship contains the failure. If you convict yourself of failure, then it is your relations among self-states that have suffered the collapse. To fear failure is actually to fear that our relationships with the people we need will fail; it is not illness, pain, or death that constitutes failure, but rather to feel deprived of love. When we cry seemingly out of nowhere, it is often because a self-state that is accustomed to being unrecognized discovers she has been seen, has been spoken to, is cared about. That has happened and—as your draft eloquently shows—a conversation among selves has started. Improving that dialogue improves more than an essay. I look forward to reading the next draft. You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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