What's striking to me in retrospect is how I had come up with this idea a lack of self-respect is a virtue. I should rephrase that -- I felt a lack of pride was a virtue. I remember an encounter with my mother once when I was in eighth grade where she shouted in an exasperated voice "Don't you have any pride?" and I shouted back that pride was one of the seven deadly sins. She rolled her eyes and percussed a loud sigh. She didn't get where I got these ideas.
For reasons I don't totally understand myself, I never valued self-reliance or individualism much. I might well have been a product of television shows and my teachers lessons' that kindness and cooperation trumps all or maybe I'm just an enormous wuss and its easier to work with people than to strike out on your own. In any case, from a young age I developed what seems to be a very non-American outlook on the nature of individualism that has carried me through to this day.
Just recently, in a conversation with my Nanny (my father's mother) I found myself explaining my decision not to go to law school. In a post on this very blog about 8 months ago I was all raring to go, fulfilling what I had been taught was my long-delayed destiny. However, a commentator on that post pointed out that I likely was likely not going to be able to gain the qualifications for what I'd like to do through law school. Law school, it seems, is only for those who want to become attorneys. If that seems axiomatic and obvious to you, it certainly wasn't to me. I watch and listen to all manner of professionals with law training who don't actually practice law but I guess either those days are over, or those are the lucky few who ascend to the top of their profession.
Anyway, a near endless deluge of people I know in law or law school telling me not to go to law I simply chalked up to their thinking law would be a more prestigious profession than it turned out to be. Since I had been working for years in grouphomes and as an appraiser any job after law-school was going to be a pretty big upgrade. However, after reading this article in the Times, hearing one has to make more than $60,000 a year just to stay ahead of their law school debt and hearing about a recent poll (if anyone could find it, I'd appreciate it) stating that the majority of people working in law would recommend those considering going into law not do so.
Anyway, you can read more about this at this blog but the upshot is law school is filled with kids who think they're going to be the one to land the big-time job when all the statistics point to the irrefutable fact that that is very unlikely. Furthermore, the unlikelihood grows with each passing year. At first, I ignored people telling me to rethink my plans but after reading this open letter to the Boston College dean I finally had a panicked moment followed by some clarity. Finally, I gave real credence to the idea that law school would not be the best idea. I saw a lot of myself in this student and I really felt his pain at having this expensive degree without being about to find a job. In it, he writes:
I found this particularly striking because I could never, in a million years, get into a school as good as BC law and yet, here was someone who was in exactly that position couldn't provide for his young family the way he needed to.
"I write to you from a more desperate place than most: my wife is pregnant with our first child. She is due in April. With fatherhood impending, I go to bed every night terrified of the thought of trying to provide for my child AND paying off my J.D, and resentful at the thought that I was convinced to go to law school by empty promises of a fulfilling and remunerative career. And although my situation puts the enormity of the problem into sharp focus, there are a lot of us facing similar financial disasters."
To get back to my Nanny - I read that letter and my heart aches for the guy, I can picture myself 3 years from now in the exact same position. Meanwhile, my Nanny, upon hearing me recount the story has no sympathy at all. In an individualist's head success, jobs, money, prestige - these are the things we use to keep score and if you're not a success then you deserve your lot. There is no luck, there is only success and not.
The fact that I read the above and thought that law school sounded more like a lottery system then a solid path to providing for my future wife and family represented weakness in the eyes of my family. In my eyes, it represented prudence and the almost-wise learning from other people's life experience; and thus, making adjustments in my own life. For the individualist, those who are strong do; they do without regard of caution. In other words, if I had true confidence, than I would succeed no matter what.
I guess I'm not strong, so while I study now to the end of a PhD in government management and public policy (a degree that carries none of the esteem of a J.D. in my family), I'm reminded that instead of meeting my challenges head on, I tried to circumvent them, because I lack self-confidence. But if that means I also don't have a lot of hubris, I'm ok with that.
"Modern American parents teach their children that they can be anything they want to be; in ancient Greence such overweening of confidence in the individual's ability to shape his or her own fate was the sin of hubris, and it brought the protagonists of many Greek tragedies to bitter ends." -Stephanie Koontz
