Comparisons in BookThree: Flight Log 2016

You know what is making today particularly frustrating?

I got the opportunity to see how a professional firm runs. Attorneys walking into each other’s offices, meeting clients… assistants and paralegals running about. Life. Conversation. Connection.

Meanwhile… I’m here… navel gazing because I’m honestly not sure what I should be doing and I’m 100% alone in the office. I did not, despite numerous people encouraging me to do so, open my own Solo Firm. I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t want to do it all alone. I accepted this job. Where, apparently, I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m doing it all alone. Life is too short and we spend too much of it at work for work to be such a miserable experience.

“The people feel and look the same, like they’ve settled here even though they know there’s something more-something better-just beyond where they are.

Small-town life.”
― Courtney Summers, Fall for Anything

“Future Farmers of America. Group who take ag classes and are going to inherit the farm. Hot shit around here, they have a couple guys in every clique, and they stick together, ‘cause they know they’ll be seeing each other every week for the next sixty years.”
― John Barnes

“The real core of this book is about the open secrets that can fester in a community until an outsider raises questions.”
― J. Alexander Greenwood, Pilate’s Cross

“This is a small town, so everyone talks. Ironic, isn’t it—so few people, so many opinions?”
― Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

“There is only one good thing about small town
You know that you want to get out”
― Lou Reed

“You can live here all your life, and still be considered an outsider.”
― E.D. Rea

“Maybe it’s a symptom of a small town—and Gentry certainly was that—but for some, even after graduation, high school never really ends.”
― Matt Abrams, She’s Toxic

I guess I feel hollow. Like… there are all these lives humans live every day… and I thought by now I would have been able to make ONE of those lives have meaning. And I come here to try to understand. To try to connect… either with myself or anyone else.

It is moments like this that tell me, prove to me, loudly and without ambiguity that I do not have to feel shitty about trying to leave this job or this area. While I still deeply respect that this may be life-giving to some… it is crippling to me. And I imagine I am as tired of writing about it as you are of hearing it. I do take some solace in the fact that, those who have been in my position, encourage me. While I sit here doubting myself and my decisions; they have said they did the same. While they were in my chair, they wondered if they should have gotten out of the game all together. Then they escaped this place. And they now say they love what they do. It brings them joy. This is the crucible of pain that stands as an example of how bad it can be; those who survive and go on to do more have this scar that reminds them to push on, to do more, to be better. I understand I have to struggle through; bare this burden; shoulder this weight. I understand, too, that I have been broken faster than those who went before me. BUT in my defense… my earliest predecessor had a teacher. Then her replacement had been in business for years before me. I am the first to this position with no teacher and no prior experience. I am the greenest simply in terms of professional background. So it comes as no surprise that this experience, which so thoroughly broke more experienced attorneys, would hollow me out so quickly. I will try, hard as I can and bungling everything along the way, I will try to do my job here… but I will continue to apply to everything I can to leave. To get to somewhere, anywhere, that can run. At all. For too long have these words been carved over my career: