I have had a bad couple of months. Of epic proportions. While trying to navigate some extremely difficult changes at work, kid drama, unexpected home repairs, and this endless endless winter I have been thinking really hard about who I used to be.
I used to be fun. I used to be carefree and able to enjoy things. Now I know this sounds like depression talking, and it probably is, but it also means that fundamentally something about me has changed and I'm not comfortable with it.
I noticed that fun things tend to be avoidance as opposed to legitimate hobbies. I noticed that rather than having a blast playing a new video game, I find myself wanting to go do it during moments of stress. That doesn't feel healthy to me. Why is it that I am no longer able to detach from my life that are causing me stress? Why can I not put those things aside for a few hours to truly enjoy something?
It affects my ability to be a good mom. I don't want to spend time with my son endlessly discussing Pokemon. I don't want to sit down and do homework with them even though I know that they desperately need me to do that. I don't want to take my oldest to the mall and window shop. I just want to hide in my bed under the covers and pretend the world doesn't exist. I have felt this way before, off and on for many years.
The only consistent cause I can truly identify is that I am a lawyer. I often think about how lawyers discourage people from going to law school. It seems odd to me because not every law job is the same. And not everyone is capable of addressing stress in the same way (whether well or poorly.) But enough people talk about how miserable they are as attorneys that there must be something to it.
Is the law causing my depression? I can certainly identify a lot of things about it that are not healthy for people. For example, it is perhaps the only profession where it is intentionally designed to be adversarial to such an extreme degree. Your ability to do well at your job depends in part on your ability to actively sabotage your counterpart's ability to do theirs. In order to effectively litigate, you have to try make the other side fail. I remember attending a wellness seminar by one of our Supreme Court justices in Utah and she ask the audience to imagine you are a brain surgeon in the middle of a surgery. The patient is on the table with their head cut open and you are actively inside their brain attempting to perform the surgery. A rival brain surgeon enters the operating room and begins actively taunting you. The rival surgeon wants you to fail, and they get paid to do this.
That type of working environment would be toxic for anyone. And unfortunately, that is the way the law is designed. What started out as a healthy rival boxing match intended to make both sides perform at their best possible level has devolved into a toxic bare-knuckle no-holds-barred street fight. We spout off platitudes about civility and the great profession, and yet when someone violates those rules there are rarely consequences for it. Which makes sense, because at the end of the day zealous advocacy has become equivalent to throwing out the rule book. Platitudes don't mean much when judges don't impose sanctions for uncivil behavior. When a defense attorney can toss around terms like prosecutorial misconduct with impunity, it demoralizes public servants like me.
That said, the vast vast vast majority of defense attorneys that I work with on a regular basis are extremely civil and ethical. I would have a beer with any of them anytime. Even while in trial against them! But those few, the ones who don't seem to care what the words they say actually mean, ruin it for everyone.
So is the law causing my depression? I don't know. But I can clearly identify things about the work that impact my mental health. The next question is what to do about it?
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