by sombrio » Fri Apr 22, 2016 8:50 pm
Ha, I hear you on that. One of my big turning points was when I Googled "support group for recovering attorneys" just for a laugh, and found somebody who has a business helping lawyers get out of law. I'm pretty sure there's more than one, too. An entire cottage industry dedicated to helping professionals get out of their profession. What other business has that?
My undergrad degree was in politics, so there's not much I can do with that. I want to get more involved in politics (you can see some of my reason why in this very thread) but probably not as a paying career. Here in California at least, teachers in public K-12 schools generally have a master's degree in education that they get together with their teaching credential. Colleges are a little looser, and there are some positions that say you're qualified if you have an undergrad degree in a relevant field plus a JD. I've applied for some of those but never got a response. I suspect the college professor market is as bad as the law market. One idea I've been kicking around is to do one of these programs where you work your ass off for a year, get paid very little, but get a master's degree and a teaching credential at the end of it. I think I could stick it out for one rough year. But I'm not sure whether I want to be a high school teacher that much. Maybe, but I just don't know. I don't want to pour myself into another career just to get burned out again. I would love to make a career out of writing, but it's not the kind of thing that pays the bills right now. Thank God for my wife!
I have/had a blog (haven't done anything with it for a year or so) but it was about politics, sports and culture, not myself. I guess my story would be relatable to many, but I also think it's so common as to be uninteresting, and I'd get a little uncomfortable blogging about something so intensely personal. Besides, the truth is just that I'm fucking lucky. I got lucky by having relatives who could help me with my student loans and by having a wife who makes a reasonable salary at a steady job.
Besides, most of what I really want to say about the situation, I can generalize to the American economy as a whole. It's not just lawyers who played by the rules, worked hard, did everything they were told to, and then had the job market swept out from under them, after all; it's not just lawyers who are being abused by their employers; and it's not just lawyers who are suffering at the hands of a rigged, oligarchic corporate economy. I've blogged about this at length but in the end I found it depressing because there's only so many ways you can say this stuff before it starts to look very repetitive. Maybe I'll give it another try sometime, but in the meantime I'm enjoying focusing on fiction.
I'm curious about your experiences, too. Are you still in Mexico? I don't think I've ever talked to a Mexican lawyer in detail, now that I think about it. What's the market like? Are there any things about the legal system that would surprise me? Not that it has much to do with anything, but I thought it was fun learning the Spanish legal terms (in the American system). Like how the complaint is called a "demand." Comparative law is fun.