About me, if you're wondering

Please see my original post here.



It's been a long haul to law school.

I studied fine arts at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Ask me about Detroit sometime. I have lots of theories and a few stories but don't really understand the city. Detroit chased me out and I can tell you about that, too.

I always knew I wanted to be a painter. I started taking art classes when I was in elementary school. I kept studying art all the way to college and beyond. I graduated college with some honors and I planned to head to graduate school somewhere on the East Coast. In the meantime, I worked a series of low-paying and mind-numbing jobs and one really great position as a freelance art critic for a local newspaper. Those stories about Detroit kept eating at me.

41 South Street, Quincy, MA, 2nd floor apartment. It was mid-morning on a Saturday and I was turning off a hallway light: this was the moment when I knew it had to be law school. It happened that suddenly. This is neither metaphor nor allegory; it's just the facts.

They ought to give you a box at law school orientation to hold all of your old memories and freedoms. I remember learning the multiplication tables in elementary school and thinking that there was no going back. There was no forgetting how to multiply and there was no going back to being that kid who could only add. (Yes, I was that kind of child.) I don't remember how my mind worked before I learned about affirmative defenses and burdens of proof and mens rea and causation. Those stories from Detroit look different to me now. I wish I had had a box.

I'm studying law at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, Mass. I started a decade later than most law students do. I recommend that route, if it's doable. My academic brain was a bit rusty but my empathetic mind was ready to go. I also save a lot of time by not having to prove anything to anyone except myself.

I have great respect for my classmates who always knew they wanted to be lawyers. Starting down a straight path and continuing to its end is commendable. But a meandering route is also okay.

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them...

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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