Wednesday (Not As) Motivational (As I’d Like)

I’m going to just quote an email I just sent to the bar wellness committee executive board I’m on with some redactions to protect the guilty (me).

I’m writing a survey to send out to [some attorneys] and to pass on to the other [attorneys] because no has actually checked in on how people are doing to my knowledge, and someone has to. Not only for now, but for when this is over in the next six to eighteen months (at the height of the coming economic depression we’re only beginning to experience now. So we have that going for us.).

In case you don’t know or forgot, I work in [REDACTED]. I had to take a day off, which is not the ideal thing to do, but I’ve been acting like an even bigger asshole than usual especially on Monday because the stress got to me and I am in that minority group of people with depression whose symptoms manifest most powerfully through anger (the only cohort that widely shares this symptom is minority adolescents, because of course it does. That’s a whole other issue that, at the least, I think lawyers should learn about at some point). Luckily it mostly just makes me stress eat and yell at people online, but that’s coping and not healing. Healing is realizing what I was doing and why and how to manage these concerns and thoughts and stressors without being that way.

Which leads me to this aside [where I responded to] some tweets about how some of what people are finding themselves doing during this are coping mechanism. In response, I said “This is the worst possible advice.”

Coping, as I understand it, is the opposite of healing. It’s why “Cope” is a pejorative troll response to people online. It’s an antisocial reaction to trauma by people who are overcome by both the trauma and their perceived powerless to heal or react to trauma and stress in healthy ways. And lawyers are the last people on Earth who get to use the excuse of “powerless” when dealing with trauma, except that we not only have but created this bullshit lie that we cannot rely on each other to process and handle and heal from trauma and stress because we are neoliberal atomized individuals, which are in themselves collections of commodities – interests, traits, attention – completely separate from everyone else around us. So, in fact, we are the ones making it worse and normalizing antisocial and unhealthy and dangerous reactions to stress and trauma. And we need to cut that out RIGHT NOW. In the immediate time, we can turn to our peers in the law, in our social spaces, in our homes, and be openly vulnerable and compassionate to others experiencing trauma and stress and acting out in these unhealthy ways. In the long run we need to completely rewrite the rules of how we see ourselves and each other and how we interact with ourselves and each other.

Also, some things aren’t really coping. Sometimes people are just tired or bored or not experiencing trauma but maybe have just realized what is actually important and matters to them more than, say, billing every six minutes of their lives.

I became a peer support specialist because I don’t like hierarchies and how we run things as professionals, but I’m not stupid enough to think that we can just implement a new model. As participants in institutions like the bar and leaders in our legal community and with access to other leaders and employers, I think it’s incumbent upon us to have them reach out and let our colleagues know it’s okay to talk to each other or [the attorney assistance program] or whomever so that they don’t engage in harmful and antisocial coping mechanisms, especially when our profession’s most popular coping mechanism is and has long been isolation and substance use – which are easier to do now and the latter is already increasing (along with domestic violence, including sexual abuse) among the regular population. So it is virtually assured that substance use among ourselves is also increasing as a percentage of the bar and in the amount of substances used. And, of course, this has to be really reinforced among law students and their administrators, professors, student leaders, everyone needs to reach out ASAP as finals are upon us if not already over. (BTW, I’m generally averse to ascribing words more power than meaning, but we have to call outreach to law students anything BUT “bar crawls” for obvious reasons.).