Stumbling Upon Law School

Music, my past lover

Thoughts race. Fingers scuttle across the keyboard. I am sitting at a Steinway & Sons piano, feeling the damp weight of the silent audience. The frigid spotlight on me seems to be the only source of light in the concert hall. The awareness of my surroundings becomes more acute, as the wooden keys

Has Steinway ever made a grand piano in which the keys were not ivory?

repel the slimy sweat of my throbbing fingers. Fingers walking on a tightrope, I can’t fall, I can’t fall, keep the thought at bay. It is contained in a buckling box before bursting out, forcefully, you will fall, you will fall. The keys merge and the fingers forget their proper place. I stop, confused.     I was trained as a classical pianist until the age of 17. I quit almost a decade ago; the memories are a distant past. Classical music to me is a past lover that I refuse to get over by not ever thinking about. One nearly traumatic memory with music is that I would forget what to do and abruptly stop on stage. There were many things that didn’t work out between music and me, but performance anxiety played a salient role in closing off the path. It may sound strange that coming to law school to some extent felt like revisiting that past. Lawyering involves words and wits, and language and music are more alike than first appearance allows us to think. They both involve internalizing a system of rules and ultimately transcending those rules to communicate something essential and personal.   Generating sound that is pleasant to the ears requires a high degree of control over the instrument. Music, contrary to popular belief, is not free from the imposing laws of physics and mechanics. The fingers have to strike the keys from certain angles and the regularity of intervals between the notes makes the occasional irregularities special. The indication of mastery is when the rules and controls that are required of a pianist become second nature to them to the point where they can transcend those limitations, much like in language where you operate within the manifold rules until you get comfortable enough to break them and create unconventional—creative—use cases.   One difference, however, that has prevented the two experiences, playing the piano and going down the path of the legal profession, from bearing the kind of semblance that is hurtful is whether I let myself be vulnerable. Performing on stage required radical vulnerability. There was no shred of anonymity or excuse I could hide behind. Contrarily, there have been plenty of excuses available in law school, especially that this is just what I do for work, and that I have more important things that enrich my life.

Stumbling upon law school

I stumbled upon law school. For someone with musical and linguistic aptitude who is fond of reading and writing, going to law school seemed to cross off the boxes, although I am still not certain what I have committed to. I scrambled to find reasons why it had to be law to get my foot in the door and then go around telling people that I don’t have a lofty reason for coming to law school—not a great cause to fight for that led me down this path. But more recently, I started to wonder if I was the one preventing myself from being invested in any cause. Not wanting to experience the existential frustration that I once felt with music, I have been compartmentalizing and categorizing law school work as impersonal, irrelevant, and unessential to personal fulfillment. The story that I have been telling myself, that I feel indifferent about the decision to come to law school, that I came only because it was one among many paths that made sense to me at the time, started to feel like an avoidant defense mechanism. This may be true to some extent, but is it helpful?

Creating my own path

I had no idea exactly what draft I was going to read, but I was right to know that I would be grateful for the chance to read it, as you will be later. I think you've seen quite deeply as a result as going to look. The consequence is the experience of "internalizing" what you "already know," which is insight. Brava. Now, as you say, onward.

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