the great leap eastward

Kudos to the guessers who guessed that my big news involved a change of venue. I will, in fact, not be reporting back to the law school of my 1L year when classes start there next week.

It's no secret that the school I attended this year was not the greatest fit for me. But I'd like to think that I made the best of it, and I can say with certainty that it made the best of me. Between my beloved moot court (which, yes, it hurt to quit) and the incredible shower of gold into my lap that was law review, I was all but ready to shelve my original master plan and stick around the place for another two years. Why not? I had my scholarship, things were looking up, and I might even have a shot at Order of the Coif or maybe a clerkship with the California Supremes.

But life has a way of making other plans. And then other plans even on top of those.

Remember. I spent more or less the entire first semester repressing my discontent and telling myself to keep my eyes on the prize, the prize being a transfer to the school across the bay which had waitlisted me back in February. Then my fall grades came back, everything turned to stone, and my master plan looked dead on the vine.

So I coped. I forced myself to sit on the righthand side of the MUNI trolley, so that my back was always to the bay. I dug in at school, telling myself that if I didn't have such a chip on my shoulder I wouldn't have any issues graduating from a solid, respectable school that placed 90% of its graduates in a state where I enjoyed living. And then I discovered the thrill of moot court, and then I realized that there was a way for me to make this work.

That was the turning point, it seemed: the point at which news became good news. I made the moot court team, drafted to argue both sides of the issue in my first choice competition. My spring grades came down with an unexpected flourish. And then, of course, law review burst over my academic career like a wave.

Meanwhile, under the radar -- and you'll forgive me for my unwillingness to breathe a word of this on Sua Sponte -- I spent the month of June assembling and distributing my transfer applications. I didn't anticipate Law Review coming my way, and while I knew it would hurt to walk away from Moot Court, I felt I still owed it to my master plan to take whatever shot I could. Based on the advice of a mentor, I applied not only to my original target school but also to a handful of others. For strategic purposes, of course.

Life making other plans the way it tends to, I found myself rejected by one school after another, beginning with the school of my dreams, my waitlist school, the east bay object of my affections. Heartbreaker. Damn them. I drank a great deal, then sobered up enough to equilibrate. This was it. This was the best I could do. My original master plan had failed. Had I failed too? Maybe. Or maybe there was no shame in where I was. Maybe this was all I deserved. Maybe it was time, once and for all, to give up on the mythical eventual move back east and settle locally and buy a house.

Two days after we prequalified for a mortgage, my phone rang.

Life had gone and made other plans again while I was busy coping with the previous round of plans it had made. I had been accepted as a transfer student to one of the best schools to which I had applied, one of the best schools in the country. A school that had never been part of my master plan. A school, incidentally, nowhere near where we currently lived and were planning to purchase a home. And I had exactly a week to respond to the offer.

This was Thursday, August 7.

This week was about the worst imaginable stretch of time to make such a decision. I spent the weekend in Phoenix and Monday through Wednesday in Yosemite. The inlaws were in town. My husband, never the most flexible of people, was livid that I was springing such a decision on him with only a week's notice. We didn't talk about it in Yosemite, aside from his parents teasing him every so often about moving to a strange city. I collected advice from as many people as I could think of: my mentor, my uncle, St. Dan, and as many of my late father's best friends as would return my phone call.

(A bit of black comedy: picture me, on the interstate in 110-degree Phoenix, in a car being driven by a woman I met several hours earlier, collapsing into sobs on the phone with a guy who, with the insight of a longtime jogging buddy, gave me the advice that Dad would have. "No-brainer," he said. "Your dad would say go." Cue the flood. "I'm bleeding mascara!" I hiccupped at him. The woman I'd known for a few hours obligingly passed me a Kleenex.)

Everyone, even my grudging husband, seemed to agree that there was only one real option here.

"But I made Law Review," I protested. "Does this even trump Law Review?"

Yes, it does, independently concurred nearly everyone I asked.

"You should try to write onto Law Review there too," my uncle added.

So, Thursday morning, August 14, I sent in my fax accepting the position. I'm now a member of the class of 2005 at a national top ten school. We've got a few weeks to pack up everything and scoot to a place where neither of us has ever lived before. Oh See Eye starts on the second of September. I haven't a clue when I actually choose my classes. And suddenly I realized that I was absolutely, utterly terrified.

I'd really done it, see: I'd convinced myself I was someone else. I can blame school for sapping my self-esteem, but in reality, I was the one who let it. I stopped believing that I was capable of astounding things, trimmed myself down, psychologically cast myself into the mold since it appeared to be the only viable option. And now I'm presented once again with the opportunity to be the person I'd always taken for granted, the one with the kung fu.

I'm probably running afoul of every advice-giver who has ever given advice against defining oneself in context. "You're not your grades," "You're not your school," "You're not your weight," "You're not your pre-plastic-surgery body image," etc. Believe me, I wouldn't argue with any of that, and intend to give exactly the same advice to my own offspring. Defining oneself exclusively in context, particularly when the context is as ephemeral as public opinion or conventional wisdom, is only ever unwise. You've got to be anchored somewhere.

Having said that, I'll confess that one of my main anchors has always been a sense of my own capability. Such a thing is tough to define in a vacuum, outside of the "I'm good enough, smart enough, and goshdarnit people like me" mere sufficiency mindset. So I do look to context. Where I am, and how I do there, whether at work or in school, has historically provided me with decent metrics of what I'm capable of delivering. Right now, I'm coming from an environment that felt limiting to me, and I don't think it's unreasonable to freak out at the sudden absence of limits.

Getting over this fear should be as simple as showing up for my first interview in September, internalizing the name of my new law school as the institution I actually attend (sure enough, there it is on the resume: "J.D. expected, 2005"!), and realizing I'm back in the old zone. This year served the exact purpose for which it was intended. My old school and I broke each other in like a pair of shoes. From what people tell me about this school, the fit should be immediate and virtually blister-free.

Well might you ask: alright, JCA, what school is it already? To which I respond: you're a smart reader, and I'm a casual keeper of such secrets. You'll figure it out. But I'm not telling, particularly not before Oh See Eye is over.

I will give this hint though: it's to the northeast of here, and is near a body of water. :)

thus spake /jca @ August 16, 2003 10:51 PM