Everyone I know is going to law school. This may sound like an exaggeration, but spend enough time with me, meeting my friends, and you will realize that it’s true. Of my close friends – the ones in the country anyway – 90% are in law school as of this week. My acquaintances have a slightly lower rate of law school attendance, but still clock in well above average. Visiting several of these friends in New York over the weekend, I began to wonder what the predominance of law school as a life choice says about my friends, and by extension, about me.
Note: I do not want to attend law school. Occasionally I consider it for very short periods of time before remembering that I would hate it, and also I do not want to be a lawyer.
So what is it? I think there are two main explanations.
First, I think law school has become a catch-all for my generation of do-gooders who don’t know exactly how they want to do good (all of my friends in law school want to do “public interest law” when they get out). In this sense, it’s not about me at all. This characterization is insufficient though, as it makes my friends sound like they just stumbled into law school because they didn’t know what else to do. Law school was a long-term goal for many of my friends, and they all have good solid reasons behind choosing it, even if most of them don’t have a specific type of law or career path in mind (who really does in their early twenties?).
Second, I think I am drawn to intelligent, high-achieving, and public-minded people: the kind of people who excel at law school and public interest law. I’m very lucky to know my friends, who I expect to do great things with their lives. We share, generally, interest in public policy and politics, drive, and sufficient practicality (or cynicism?) to think that change often comes from within the structure of power (which is why neither I nor many of my friends are off being anarchists or protesting in the streets).
I think both of these things are true, but even in combination they feel insufficient. Why have all of my friends, one after one, gone into law and not public policy or public health or journalism or non-profit management? Is it a matter of practicality? (a lawyer can usually get a job) Or do I just like very logical people? And why am I the odd one out?
This is probably unrelated, but I realized a few months ago that I am the only younger child among my friends. I know only children, and one or two middle children, but the vast majority of my friends are older siblings. I am technically a middle child, but by the time my little sisters were born sibling roles in my family had already been established, so I consider myself a younger child. Yet I am not close to any younger children. Not a single one. Again: coincidence?
What I am pushing towards, awkwardly and with many diversions, is a sense I have of straddling a line. I get along with very logical, high-achieving people, and in those relationships I can hold my own – reason out an argument, pull apart a fallacy – but I have no desire to base my career on that kind of thought. I am happier feeling out the tangled history of a character, or a culture. I am, in some ways, more typically like an older child than my brother: driven, responsible. But my brother is holding down a solid job, saving up money, owns a house, has a nice car, and I am running around being a mess and mooching off my relatives.
It is confusing, this act of figuring out who I am. It is still a work in progress. I know it’s not any easier for older siblings in law school. Still, I think my flashes of law school consideration are due to a desire to pick one side of the line. I want to be a practical, rational person on an outward-facing career path. Or, I want to be a writer. I don’t know how to be both. I don’t know if that’s possible; will these pieces of myself be integrated, or will I veer back and forth between them for the rest of my life, always feeling out of place?
(If it’s not obvious, I have a lot of time to think just now. Possibly too much time.)
