There’s a cliché that college graduates with degrees in arts and humanities struggle to find jobs.
So when I graduated with a B.A. in drama and English, I was prepared to struggle. I soon found that it was even more difficult than I had imagined. A year after graduating, I was frustrated and tired, still struggling to find decent work with reasonable pay. I wanted clearer direction in my career, I wanted a sense of purpose, and frankly, I wanted a bigger paycheck.
I began to think more seriously about how I could get myself on a more fulfilling career path. I knew I wanted to do work with social impact, work that would positively affect the people around me. I knew, from my background in drama and English, that I was a compelling speaker and that I was skilled at reading dense text. Maybe, I thought, law school would be the path for me.
GOING BACK TO SCHOOL
Once I’d made my decision, I was devoted to it. I studied hard, took the LSAT, and sent in my applications. I was incredibly lucky to be admitted to a well-regarded private school in my hometown, just minutes away from my childhood home. I even got some scholarship money.
I started school in the fall and jumped right in, fully committed to studying. Eager to get experience with clients, and to do good, valuable work, I even spent my extra time volunteering at a low-cost legal clinic. The workload was intense, but that was fine. Working hard had never scared me before. However, I soon found that law school was taxing in a way that went beyond the workload.
Once, during orientation week, a school administrator told us “sometimes you’ll have to dial back your feelings in law school.” At the time, it seemed like nothing more than a joke about the stress of grad school, but as the semester progressed, I understood that statement in a new light. In my classes, we spent every day reading cases about murders, kidnappings, and negligent harms inflicted on innocent bystanders. Plenty of my classmates were perfectly capable of reading these cases philosophically, but I couldn’t help but imagine myself as the lawyers handling those cases, worrying about what I’d do.
THE EMOTIONAL SIDE OF WORK
In my work as a volunteer in a low-cost legal clinic, I found that many cases left me feeling bleak. The work we were doing was good, but emotionally demanding in a way I hadn’t experienced before. I was wracked with anxiety about what would happen to clients if they lost their cases. Soon, I started finding myself sitting in my car long after I’d gotten home, stomach churning, too anxious and emotional to walk inside and act normally.
Near the end of the semester, I finally broke down. I was tired, yes, and stressed, but mostly I felt weighed down by the toll that law school took on me. It hadn’t occurred to me how much emotional labor I’d need to do the work that interested me. Turning my feelings "off", the way the school administrators had recommended, didn’t feel doable for me. The thing that had drawn me to law—my desire to help others—also made it exhausting.
In one way, I was on exactly the right track: I was getting work experience and a good education. My family was incredibly proud of me. But I was also miserable. I didn’t want to go down a career path that looked impressive, but made me feel awful.
So I weighed my options, I thought carefully, and I dropped out of law school. Although I still felt passionate about the power of the law to change the world for the better, I knew that I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to do that work for the rest of my life, or even for the next ten years. I knew that at some point, I’d burn out, and I’d incur a lot of debt heading in that direction. I left law school without a degree, but I still feel my time there was valuable. I learned an enormous amount about what I wanted and needed in a career. I learned that I needed to take into consideration not just my interests and my skills, but also my fears and my limits.
WHAT NEXT?
The first few months after dropping out weren’t easy. I dreaded going to interviews, being asked about the gap on my resume, and having to explain that I’d dropped out of law school after one semester. Surprisingly though, when the question came up, I was rarely judged. Instead, I found that people respected that I knew my interests and my limits, and had made a difficult decision in pursuit of a career that suited me.
This time around, it was important to me to I pursue work that would make me feel fulfilled instead of drained. I eventually found a job I enjoyed doing research and technical writing. I also started a blog, and found a passion for crafting posts and connecting with readers. This year, I left my full-time job to pursue freelance writing. Now, I enjoy my work. It excites me and makes me feel empowered. I’m still able to speak out on issues that I’m passionate about, and to touch the lives of others, but I don’t feel like a wrung-out sponge at the end of the day.
In the end, emotional well-being is an enormous part of what makes us happy in our careers. No matter how much you care about what you do, if you consistently feel overwhelmed and sad at the end of the workday, that work will not sustain you. And that’s what a good career should do—sustain you.
This June, I watched my law school classmates graduate. I was proud and thrilled for the great work I know many of them will do, but I wasn’t jealous of them. I’ve found a path that suits me better.
