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Is This What it Feels Like?

-- By MeherGeorge - 18 Feb 2025

Backstabber Elegy

I read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy when I was sixteen years old; my adolescent self would be shocked to know the same thoughtful author who described the plight of Appalachia's economically insecure would become the proud Vice President to a vapid trust fund child. It would have been utterly inconceivable to my sixteen-year old self that someone whose mother suffered from drug addiction in an impoverished Ohio steel town could sign his name onto a ticket that represented anything other than understanding, let alone its polar opposite. Maybe I didn't read the memoir closely enough, but Vance's perceptiveness about the rotting effect of despair and its cyclical downwards force was not a figment of my imagination. I won't accept that J.D. Vance held a hard-earned Yale Law degree in his hands and prayed one day to rename the Gulf of Mexico and fire thousands of National Park Service employees. What did Usha Vance, who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts and edited the Yale Law Journal, think about Trump's birthright citizenship order? I guess I should instead ask what her twenty-something year old self would think. Anti-intellectualism in the United States and a politician's drive to take advantage of it has run rampant since our nation's conception, but has it always looked this awkward? I can't help but feel betrayed. I'm a terrified freshly minted law student. If this is the "legal elite" I'm apparently dying to become absorbed by, I'm in trouble.

The Impetus for Law School

Many of us were told to go to law school because we had strong opinions. Mainstream media, discourse (name your medium of culture) told us lawyers like to argue. Lawyers are hot-headed, fiery, bursting with passion for their craft, their clients, and perhaps life itself. Spend time within the walls of law school though and you're told a different story. You're told to neutralize yourself, as much as you can, to preserve the full breadth of your professional network. You never know who will be on the hiring committee of the next firm you work for, they say. You're told to join the Federalist Society for their stellar outline bank and clerkship options even if you vehemently disagree with their ideals; the omitted part is that they'll call your bluff if you're not a "believable" member. Really though, what does it say about a group if it must be a hoax when a woman of color joins? Things are what they do, not what they are called. What I do is share my opinions, and what I'm called is a law student. I tell myself dialing down my intensity for mixers and coffee chats is a temporary affliction, resolved by spewing my real thoughts to my boyfriend over the phone. I can't believe she likened Lina Khan to an inexperienced kid. Khan's doing something right to win the disgust of some rich lawyer who thinks San Francisco is dirty. Each mixer gives me new material for my weekly stand-up routine; all I need is a few new out of touch comments to complain about. Of course, my complaining turns the spotlight away from me and what the hell I'm doing there in those rooms. I clearly can't bear the real question, which is whether this is what it feels like to lose your voice.

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Passing the Reins

I miss my younger self. She had yet to grow anxious after seeing her father in a hospital gown. In her mind, American men would vote for American women, whether it was their names or rights on the ballot. She could read more than five pages without checking her phone, and she read for pleasure after long days outside. My grandfather, who has become religious all of a sudden, tells me, "We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out." I love my grandpa, but I can't handle that biblical verse. If we carry nothing out, what is this weird capitalist accumulation in the years between even good for? What good is the messy paper mache process I'm engaged in with my identity and my career? For now, the best answer I can find came to me a decade ago. In high school, I took a course on animal behavior which, in truth, made me quite cynical. I'm sure learning about pheromones and the innate drive to promote gene variation in your offspring before officially having a boyfriend did something to me. In any case, in the sea of disappointing truths about our evolutionary tendencies, I uncovered the most charming chemical, oxytocin. [Insert remainder]

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