Why do law schools not also hand out tiny crystal balls or mini laminated cards of career path options (kind of like a useful cross between E. McPan's laminated J.D. card and a "Life: The Game" playing card)? Because, WOW, could I use one. I'm having simultaneous life and career crises at the moment, and I just don't see a way out. Here's the problem (or problems, at they may be):
I have been at my current firm, in Hellacious Isolated-No-Friends-ville, for three years come September. I loooove my partners (seriously. That whole missing-the-hearing situation last week? No one even got mad. They laughed at me, of course, but that was it. All good. LOVE them.), and we've all finally gotten comfortable and chatty with each other like old friends, which is awesome - but I HATE what they pay me. (And no, they really aren't able to pay me much more than my current salary with adequate yearly raises). I also hate where I live, since everyone I know lives at least two hours from me, and in some cases, more than five. I used to visit a lot, but as time's worn on, I've gotten less and less interested in spending every single weekend on a train/plane/driver's seat, and now I see my friends only perhaps once every two months. I haven't really had any luck making new friends here, since it appears to be a hard and fast rule that everyone must get married and start procreating by age 25 in this benighted corner of the universe, and those people aren't so interested in getting to be friends with a single person. This used to be not such a problem, because Irksome was in the picture and provided a minimum of local social-life-y stuff, but given his radio silence of the last ten days, preceeded by his "this doesn't feel right," it's pretty clear he's now out of the picture. So, all I've got going here is the firm where I earn just enough to pay my bills and some part of my student loans, have fabulous mentors who will are fast approaching retirement sometime in the next ten years and without whom I have no interest in continuing to be in the firm, have a great work-life balance situation but have no "life" to occupy the free time it should otherwise go in, and have no opportunity for making new friends because everyone's at least twenty years older than me.
I do not know what to do. I don't know if I should stay here for the next ten years until everyone I want to work with retires, and then move somewhere else where I do actually know people (at which point, I'd either be such a dried-up bitter old crone that I'd probably have no friends left anyway), and resign myself to having missed out on doing a clerkship, getting my LLM abroad and getting any kind of decent job (because what firm wants a 13th-year associate lateral hire with no portable book of business and dozens of conflicts?). Or if I should start applying for clerkships and LLM programs now, which carries the burden of trying to figure out how the hell to get recommendations from professors I haven't even spoken to in three years and, in the case of the LLM, how to pay for it with my already outstanding six-figure student loan debt, and resign myself to having to leave the best mentors and senior partners I could ever hope to have. Or if I should just skip the clerkship/LLM conundrum and try to lateral to another, bigger market, where I'd earn more, but would almost certainly not have the same work/life balance or love for my bosses, and would have to deal with all the manipulation and workplace drama that comes with working in a much larger firm - and that solution brings with it the concomitant problem that I'd want to work in the appellate department of whatever firm it was, which I haven't researched but have a feeling is much more difficult to do than just showing up to an interview and saying "I want to do this," or at the very least, not continue practicing the type of law I do now, but that's also difficult, because I've never done anything else and how likely is another firm to want to hire a fourth-year associate with no experience in whatever field? yeah, not so much.
This is so frustrating. Can I just go finger-paint now?
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