Passions, Movements, Choices

[repost from my other blog]

The halfway mark on my law school career has come and gone, and I am no closer to figuring out what to do with my life than I was at the beginning. As my more ambitious classmates prepare to kiss ass at their summer law firm cocktail receptions, to track down the professors for whom they are research assistants for clerkships recommendations, and to think about public interest fellowship applications, I am left wondering whether I ought to be bothering to do the same.
Of course, to do that would require knowing what, and why.

I came to law school, ostensibly, to find my passions. It's what I told myself, anyway, and that was what my personal essay claimed. I never really had much passion for anything academic or career-oriented before law school. In my personal essay, I wrote about performing the Debussy String Quartet by memory with Awesome in the Bedroom (Ariel, Anicia, and Jeremy) junior year. I wrote about laying out and winning the game-to-go to Regionals against BU senior year. I wrote about a spark of interest in the New Bedford immigration raids case that I had observed when I was a paralegal. I hoped to find passion in law school; it was a leap of faith.

Then I got here, and then-Dean Koh told us he hoped we'd come to find our moral compass, and I gulped, knowing I didn't have one. Next to some of my classmates, who'd spent college (and even high school) careers Involved in The Pursuit of Social Justice and Trying to Change the World, I was The Selfish Hedonist who had spent all my time playing music and frisbee and ignored the outside world. Had I really come to law school to find my passions? Or did I cave into my parents' bidding -- i.e., enter a financially stable profession that would pay the bills while I reproduced and popped out more selfish, hedonistic babies that cared only for their own well-being and the well-being of their progeny?

Spring of my first year, by gift of MW's draw, I found myself immersed in an immigrants' rights clinic. I continue to find the clinical experience the single best thing I have done in law school -- indeed, the only thing that I find enjoyable about law school. Clinic has been all-consuming, and yet when I'm not constantly consumed by it, I miss it and find my life worthless without it. In my end-of-clinic reflection, I wrote that it was my "lifeblood."

I've felt at once incredibly inspired by and alienated from my fellow clinic students and supervising professors. They seem to be part of a movement, a revolution, continuing what they have always seen themselves as doing: Involving Themselves in the Pursuit of Social Justice and Trying to Change the World. The rhetoric is everywhere: we are the clinic machine, working together to further the public interest. We eagerly employ the ever-appealing narrative of the hero. We, the underdogs, serve to protect and empower the weak and the marginalized against the crushing hand of the Antichrist and the Establishment, all the while forgoing the riches that our not-as-selfless classmates pursue! We are the unsung heroes.

It makes a great story. It makes us feel great pride. It makes all the blood and sweat feel worth it.

But for me, I am new to all of this. I am always conscious of how uncomfortable I feel trying to follow them. Partly because I am not yet convinced I am on board with where the "movement" is heading. Partly because I am not yet convinced that I like the self-aggrandizing smugness of the narrative of "movements" at all. Partly because I don't appreciate the implicit normative judgments upon others that underpin the whole "movement." I don't know that I share the vision.

Recently, following my clinic partner's and my appearance in federal court, the Nasty Internetz had the following to say about me: "These students will “do their time”, pad their resumes and move on to lucrative jobs with large law firms where they will represent major corporations screwing the American public. Great."

The commenter's criticism stings with the bite of reality.

I know my fellow WIRACers, who've always been revolutionaries, will continue as they always have: fighting what they see as the good fight, doing what they see as self-sacrificing, and winning incremental battles in what they see as their never-ending quest for social justice. And I applaud them. And I wish I were like them. I wish I had the courage of their convictions and their confidence in their correctness. I wish I could get swept up in that beautiful narrative.

But maybe the Nasty Internetz is right about me. As I am beginning to realize how behind I am in the elbows-out scramble for post-law school positions, I feel as if a crucial decision-point is approaching. What am I doing with this law degree, and why?

I have come to love my clinic, to love what I am doing, to love my fellow clinic students and my clinic professors. I have come to thrive on and to live for their respect and approval. I have been nearly completely swallowed up by the clinic culture and enchanted by the clinic narrative. I know I would feel deeply disappointed in myself if I did not continue along the path that clinic has set out before me. Worse yet, I would disappoint the professors and friends who have helped me find this lifeblood.

I feel I have found my passion in law school (but wonder whether it has been for the right reasons), and yet at the same time, I cannot shake my pragmatism. Passion doesn't pay the bills, after all, and houses don't buy themselves. I don't want to subscribe to the idea that the yearning to live a decent, comfortable, and ultimately uneventful life with a family that you love ought to be replaced by a hungry drive for revolution. I don't think the moral compass points in one direction or the other. It's a false dichotomy, and maybe the choice isn't so stark as it seems right now. Maybe, as MA likes to put it, it's just an issue of not being able to see around a bend.