Every single semester since I’ve been in law school, except the first one of course, I question my reasons for going.  Every semester, I come up with the same things that make this whole endeavor sound bad:

1.  I’m too old to go law school.

2.  I could be doing something else with my evenings, four nights a week.

3.  I have spent about $11,000 of our money on this, books, tuition reimbursement and scholarships included.

4.  I could have gone on a very nice vacation to Tahiti with $11,000.

5.  No one will ever hire me because I don’t have time to clerk, given that I have a full-time job.

6. I don’t really want to quit my job to clerk because I make too much money to just walk away, but then again, I want to clerk for the experience, so it’s a Catch-22.

7.  I love reading books.  I just don’t love everything I’ve read in law school.  This one is just whining, because I think everyone in law school or everyone who has ever been in law school feels the same exact way about reading law school books.

8.  I want to be an environmental or real property attorney.  I don’t have an undergraduate finance/accounting/business/environmental/biology degree, although I was a zoology major for about 2 years.  When they told me in undergrad that I had to do either “bugs or slugs” I decided I’d rather do something not-so-gross.  I chose psychology because I really liked the freakishness of Freud and thought I might be good at it.  I was, but I never wanted to be a real psychologist.

9.  I’ll be about 4 months too old to join the military when I get out, so that one’s also not an option.

10.  I didn’t do law review, which hurts my chances of employment.  I didn’t do it, frankly because I was in summer school and did not have time to do both that and my work for summer classes.  If I had known that there would be that much work, I would have done that and not gone to summer school, but by the time I figured it out, it was too late to drop the summer class without losing my money.

11.  I don’t have time, given my job, for moot court.

12.  I am unsure whether I want to work at a firm or with an agency.  I would be happy with either.

Every semester, when I get this way, my husband looks at me and tells me that I’m doing this because it’s my dream.  I then recall why I’m doing this – of which he is correct.  He told me today that he supported me, not matter what this costs – even if it was double or more – because it was my dream and it is what I’ve wanted to do for a very long time.  He said that even if I get out of school and keep my same job or go to a job that doesn’t require me to be an attorney, he is fine with that because this is my dream and that’s all that matters.

He always makes me feel better.  Today was, once again, one of those days.  Tonight I’ll have to do my pre-semester ritual.  I always choose a good lawyer movie and watch it, just to remind me of the dream that got me here.  This year, since I’m taking Environmental Law, it will most likely be Erin Brochovich.