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[quote=Anonymous]Reading your story reminds me a lot of myself!  I have a JD and went to law school because I wanted to help people, am a good writer, both my parents are lawyers, and I didn’t know what else to do, to be honest.  I felt like you before college – was interested in health care and thought about going pre-med, but was bad at math and science, so I went in another direction.  I did fine in law school (above a 3.0 but short of cum laude) and passed the bar, but also found a lot of the material terribly boring and hard to understand!!!  I also was terrible at all the adversarial stuff (e.g., the pretend trial work that you have to do your first year).  I am now an attorney with the federal government and am bored to death.  I started out as a regulatory analyst with the fed govt (non-lawyer position), but was bored doing that so thought I would try out the lawyer thing.  I have been practicing for three years now and I find it so difficult to concentrate on the complicated stuff and am also so bored/ uninterested with this subject matter (financial regulation, banks, and privacy mostly).  I also started having really bad anxiety after coming back to work after having my daughter (post-partum anxiety) – panic attacks, having trouble breathing – so I forced myself to see a therapist.  She has made me realize that a lot of my anxiety stems from my job.  The only good thing about the anxiety is that it forced me to take a hard look at my situation and do something about it!  I’m no longer seeing the therapist (I’m feeling a lot better anxiety-wise), but I have started seeing a career counselor who specializes in lawyers and he is helping me through next steps.

I’ve taken some aptitude assessments (Meyers-Briggs, etc.) and, based on my results there, have been considering making a move into a “helping” profession like nursing, speech therapy, teaching, counseling.  Now that I am a mom, I can’t imagine going back to school and juggling that with motherhood, so I am leaning towards transitioning into something where I can help/ counsel (preferably one-on-one) but don’t need another degree.  So, I’m thinking about working in higher education administration in the career services office or working for a nonprofit where I can help people.  My federal government gig is great flexibility-wise and salary-wise, but I’m just getting to a point where I need to be doing something more meaningful/ fulfilling if I am going to be away from my daughter all day long.  When I will actually jump ship is TBD (we’ll probably have another baby and so the timing will be tricky), but I am taking steps to try to figure out what would make me happier – self-assessment (career books, seeing a career counselor, taking aptitude tests), self-care (focusing on my strengths instead of beating myself up over my weaknesses or the feeling that I am the worst attorney in my office), informational interviewing, talking to friends/ neighbors about what they do.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my story to let you know that you are not alone in feeling like you are dumb because you don’t understand the law.  You are a smart person with much to offer.  The challenge is figuring out what the best environment is for you to put your skillset to use.  Chin up – you’ll figure it out!  (And, I am really interested to hear where you end up because we kind of sound like the same person! :)
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