META-Morphosis

Hello Friends.

My dad’s birthday was this week and I had some PTO to use so we did a mini staycation. Things have been stressful beyond the pandemic and pending collapse of western democracy so it was nice to take a day and flop on the beach and think.

Warren Dunes, Michigan

The next few months are going to be pretty critical on a lot of levels and there’s going to be lots of changes. It was good to check in with myself and see where I am on things so I can then start to game out my options depending on what happens. I quieted my brain for what seemed like the first time in months and just thought about what I wanted to do instead if what I needed to do.

Later I realized I was basically working my way through Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs.

Given the times and my prepper mentality, I absolutely worked my way through the bottom levels. What happens if my dad or I get sick and die? What if there are food shortages again? What if Trump loses and refuses to leave office? What if the economy craters more and I lose my job?

But once I got through basic survival stuff I could think about what I want to do and how I want things to be. I ranked things in order of importance to me.

1. Having a life and hobbies and interests. Covid is obviously obviously obviously terrible but it’s forced me to slow down and just be. I haven’t had to do my commute and I’ve had so much more time to do things. It’s the “There’s so much more room for activities!” meme but with, like, life. To be clear, this has been important to me, but just wasn’t possible to do until recently, so I didn’t realize how important it was.

2. Getting personal enjoyment and satisfaction from daily work activities. When I log into my computer every morning, do the tasks I have to work through excite me? Are they interesting or fun? I don’t care about the “prestige” of the task, but I do like solving puzzles, learning new skills and then telling people how they can do it too.

3. People knowing what I have done and can do and otherwise having a bit of the spotlight. The past few years I’ve been in much more of a support and background role. I make things happen and a lot of the time no one knows or credits someone else. Generally speaking I’m a team player and it’s fine. But I also stopped speaking at conferences and things (because honestly I could only repeat myself so many times.) I’ve been operating this way for a few years now and part of me wonders if, well, have people forgotten about me? If they even knew about me to begin with? It seems so much of the legal tech and innovation job market and conversation is driven by who you know and what people think of you.

4. Saving entire industries from themselves. I used to think that I had it in my power - and had a responsibility - to work to make big, structural changes. I loved loved loved being an academic librarian. When I got invited to join CALI and work on their open publishing initiative, I was happy and excited to do it, but it was also a sacrifice on many levels. But it was a sacrifice I was willing to do because I thought fixing legal education and publishing was important, more important than my personal happiness.

The thing I found interesting about this list, your mileage may vary, is that this was the absolute OPPOSITE of how I would have ranked things ten years ago. I guess this is indicative of personal growth. “Personal growth” sounds like you’re a good, wise person or something but in my case it really just means that I recognize that I was miserable and I’m too stubborn to go back to that.

There’s a quote “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” It’s absolutely true. One thing that I didn’t get until relatively recently, though, is that this applies on both the micro and macro levels.

Having bad coworkers/bosses will absolutely mess your head up, especially if you’re someone like me and just assume that you’re at fault when something goes wrong. But working in an industry that refuses to accept basic facts of reality and refuses to change no matter what the implications of inertia mean is also so absolutely mentally wearing.

Story time: When I was a young and ambitious librarian, I went to a program at AALL on digital scholarship. I can’t remember the exact focus, but Dick Danner (who was law library director at Duke) spoke and this was 2007, 2008, 2009 somewhere in there. We got to the Q&A part and another library director of a T-14 law schools stood up and said they would never get rid of their physical collection of law journals because - and hand to God I swear this happened - in the case of nuclear war, the EMP would knock out the servers and then no one could access law journals.

This comment was met with nods and not, you know, a chorus of “what is wrong with you?”

I was a young librarian and these were all hugely respected people in my chosen profession. If they think it’s reasonable that someone is going to want to read A LAW JOURNAL ARTICLE after surviving the complete destruction of society, who was I to argue?

To be clear, I absolutely think someone somewhere should have all primary law on microfiche for end of society preservation, but law journal articles? C’mon, fam.

I saw this tweet this morning

The practice of law is incredibly emotionally and mentally hard. Depression, anxiety and substance abuse are rife and fortunately we’re starting to recognize that. Hopefully it will be yet another reason in the mile long list of reasons to make some changes to how law is practiced and legal services are delivered. But let’s also not forget the toll that working to get there takes on the innovators. Take care of yourself because no one else will.