By VanessaAjagu

Past Me : The Lawyer I Was Born To Be

December 2006. I liked bright-line rules. Be in bed by 9pm, pray before you eat, respect elders. Bright-line rules meant I didn’t have to think about my actions. So when my parents told me at the age of 10 that I was going to become a lawyer, that was perfectly fine with me. If anything, I was glad to have a flowchart of my future.

August 2017. My mother loved the tour of Columbia University. Maybe it was the fact that Barack Obama studied here or that she could finally live her dreams through me, her poster child; either way, she was ecstatic.

November 2017. Exam season crept. I had spent the entire semester learning not to learn but to get good grades. I barely had a coherent understanding of the practical ramifications of Milliken v. Bradley or the impact of civil procedure in police brutality prosecution. I studied in the abstract, cramming so I could regurgitate information to professors. I got burnt out by the process, the conformity, the superficial construction of the law.

January 2018. People v. Goetz. It didn’t make sense to study self-defense without considering reality. The court in Goetz effectively considered race in justifying violence yet my criminal law professor barely mentioned the implicit bias involved. 1+1=3? I started to realize that viewing everything with bright-lines comes at a disadvantage; important considerations are skipped.

February 2018. The flowchart to my future seemed more like a chore than a benefit. Why did I HAVE to be a lawyer? Why did I HAVE to work on women’s rights in Nigeria like my mother? Why did I HAVE to tell my professors what they wanted to hear? Why did I HAVE to do anything? I had gone 21 years doing things I didn’t HAVE to and it just became apparent. I had sacrificed free will for the ease that comes with blaming society for negative outcomes and glorifying the flowchart for positive ones.

Today’s Me : The Lawyer I Want To Be

March 2018. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Fulfilled. Acknowledging that I don’t have to do anything makes fulfillment easier to fathom. What a great climax to this story if it ended with me dropping out of law school. Ironically, I end up right where I began but with a different footing. I still want to be a lawyer but now I want to be a lawyer because I, Vanessa, want to. Not because I have to. I want to be a lawyer because I hate injustice and I know a legal education would support me in fighting injustice.

April 2018. “So, what type of lawyer do you want to be?” Exactly the type of lawyer that doesn’t HAVE to do anything. I don’t want to represent clients based on how much they can put on retainer but based on my intuitions. I hope to base my practice in doing what justice expects of me.

I want to be open to opportunities, being flexible and satisfied in my decision-making. Current me tends to close doors with regret but I hope to grow in my ability to trust myself. Prosecute or settle? Charge with murder or manslaughter? I want to make these calculated decisions without fear of failure. I want to be a lawyer, a person, who commits to her choices without dwelling on alternate what-if’s. After all, we learn what not-to-do through failure.

Tomorrow’s Me : Becoming The Lawyer I Want To Be

September 2018. Because I have many intersections to my identity (black, female, African), I always felt like it was my job to end racism, eliminate sexism, and eradicate corruption. However, I have learnt that my future practice is MY practice. I don't want to tick things off generic lists. As such, I aim to explore my interests when I return to law school in the fall.

In Spring, I was informed by the clerkship office that if I maintained my grades and took certain classes with a certain professor, I would obtain a clerkship. Thankfully, I know better that to think I HAVE to do anything. Aside from life's uncertainty, I'm done taking classes because I have to suck up to someone rather than because I want to learn.

As explained in my previous blogpost, I often silence myself on American racial issues because I feel the need to propel the strongest arguments before I speak. A practical solution is to enroll in Columbia’s Department of Ethnicity and Race’s class - “Comparative Study of Constitutional Challenges Affecting African Communities.” Knowledge garnered from the course would increase my confidence in speaking on race as well as give me a background into the American legal system.

Knowing I want to be a litigator, I aim to extern at the United Nations and the US Attorneys Office EDNY. By working on both international and national issues, I hope to get a clearer understanding of what scale of litigation I prefer. Consequently, finding my niche would involve similar experimentation through law school and beyond.

To improve my writing, I aim to write a journal note supervised by a professor who is willing to offer mentorship. It is important that having paid a truck-load of tuition to Columbia, I establish strong networks with the faculty.

I don’t have to do any of the above, I want to. I want to be a formidable lawyer; I want my work to speak for me. Through trial and error, I hope to learn from my failures.

Future Me : The Lawyer I Become

July 2040. Am I living in Nigeria? Am I an immigration lawyer? Did I open a women’s rights NGO? Time will tell. Whatever answer is fine. The one thing I hope is positive is that I am living my life, fighting injustice. I only pray I get to breathe before I die.

This is what growing up feels like: the discovery that being oneself isn't only a matter of following instructions. Identity involves separation as well as choice.

Making this draft better involves attention to the writing and the substance, both. The formulation "past, present, future" served you well in helping to structure the thinking, but the next draft might do well to focus on continuity. The reader doesn't encounter you as three people, but as one. Even though we are multiple personality states, we try both to present and understand ourselves on the basis that life is segmented, but not divided. An organization to the writing that reflected development and showed the transitions would give the reader what she can't find now.

Substantively, the most important contribution you can make to improvement of the draft is to accept that every choice involves loss. The losses aren't defeats, but they are realities. Here the very idea of the loss incident to choice is turned under, removed from the visible surface of the tapestry. You should restore it to visibility, so that growth can be both described and experienced fully, as it is.