#4 - Shake It Off, or, Taking up the Mantel

My lovely friend Kathy had a blog, once upon a time. I feel like we are the generation of people who will have "had blogs." Because we are, if HBO's Girls has taught me anything, the generation of self-indulgent prima donnas who want to talk about our feelings and our emotions and try to leave behind a relic of our humanity. Or something like that, right? And then we are all going to get hit in the face with the concrete brick of reality, with real life deadlines and commutes and relationships and commitments. And thus, we abandon our navel-gazing revelry and get to work. Well don't you fret - while I completely understand my friends' abandoning their blogs for real life - I am too big a narcissist and too poor at prioritizing to give up blogging for anything less than being, meh, just too lazy. But as long as there is work to do and a library for me to sit in fruitlessly, there will be blog posts.

The point that I have been dancing around is that I am going to take up the mantel of one of Kathy's last, abbreviated, blog projects. She found a moral imperative to provide law students with tips for surviving law school. She only got three tips in, which should probably leave me with a sense of foreboding, but I find myself wanting to pick up where she left off. Because law school is overwhelming, and taking a step back to re-evaluated and decide what is important and what paths need to be taken strikes me as helpful for me and hopefully illuminating for others.

I do this, however, realizing that I begin this undertaking with the optimistic view that I will survive law school, and the humility that I almost certainly don't have any actual answers. I am no pro at law school. But I am prone to navel gazing [see above] and so occasionally am given a moment of clarity where things that are self evident become so again, after being crush by my Torts textbook or my Legal Process deadline.

Shake it Off

As you will hear, law school can be cut throat. Take every smarty pants who did well in school who you ever knew, put them together in one class, and tell them that an A (and therefor a prestigious 1st year internship that could very well lay the groundwork for their entire career) is entirely contingent not on how well they know the subject matter, or how hard they've studied or even how well they do on their exams - that A is entirely contingent on you doing better than your fellow smarty pants.

I'm not Jewish, but let me just say; Oy.

My experience has thus far not been the horror story that Selma Blair painted for me in Legally Blonde (my personal quintessential law school film). A lot of people in my classes are really supportive and helpful, and virtually no one goes out of their way to make sure their classmates don't understand a concept. 

But there will be comments. "Oh, well if that works for you, then I guess go ahead." "Do you have all your summaries done yet? Because I do, but I'm worried they aren't thorough enough." Just the other day, after trying to assure a friend of mine that she had time to eat lunch, I was on the receiving end of "I'm behind. You're really behind, but that doesn't mean I'm not behind."

Excusemewhat? I'm sure I looked like I had been slapped. It hurt. It was mean. But I have the confidence that it wasn't intended to hurt or come across as mean. It almost certainly came from a place of insecurity and stress that had exactly nothing to do with me.

And that's when and why you need to shake it off. You can spend all day freaking out about whether or not you're behind, or you can just go ahead make sure it's not true. Mind games - and whether mind games are actually being played, or we all just read way too much into other people's actions, is an assumption I would certainly contest - are not going to help you.

what is more likely to help you is this picture of a Puli jumping. Or "shaking it off," if you will.

We all (hopefully) are going to go be lawyers, and that probably means some of us will work with each other. So don't be a douche. But if some one is a douche, don't vilify them. Shake it off, and realize that we're all probably a little stressed.