Making it "official"

When someone asks me what I do for a living, it always makes me pause. Some would say that I am an attorney because I graduated from law school, passed the bar, and have been sworn in to my state bar association. However, I don’t yet feel like an attorney. I do not have a job, have never represented a client, and am still too nervous to even give out unsolicited legal advice. Usually I end up answering the question with an overly-long description of my status as a law school graduate… bar admittee… applying for jobs… bad economy… student loans… and it trails off into nothingness as the asker smiles politely and mentally regrets having asked me the question.

This made me wonder, when will it be “official”? When will I feel confident enough to answer this question without hesitation? Will it be when I pay my first round of bar dues? When I am hired by a law firm or government organization? When I have my name on an office door, or on a business card with a company logo? When I earn my first paycheck? When I first speak on the record? When I submit my first brief? Win my first case?

These questions made me think of my very short-lived teaching career. I was fresh out of college with a degree in Classics, having never taught a day in my life. My junior high school alma mater offered me a teaching position despite my lack of teaching degree and experience. I found myself on the first day of class, 7:30 am, petrified, with dozens of pairs of adolescent sleepy eyes blinking up at me. I had prepared for this class for hours, creating meticulous lesson plans, mentally running over my introduction and the major points of my lecture, and creating handouts for class time and homework. Despite this prep work, I felt completely unprepared and inadequate, certain that my students would see right through me, or would hate me, or (worse) would ignore me.

I suspected that the middle schoolers could smell fear, so I put on my bravest face, took a deep breath, and dove into my memorized introduction monologue. I know I spoke too quickly, that I stumbled over a few of my words, and that I probably said some things that made no sense. However, I survived that first lesson, and by the end of the week, I felt like I was well on my way towards earning the title of “teacher” despite my lack of experience or credentials. The lesson that I learned was “fake it till you make it”, which served me well that first exciting, frustrating and terrifying year of teaching.

I applied this lesson a few months ago when my son was born. The nurses handed me a wiggling, screaming, messy bundle and congratulated me on becoming a mother. At that moment I felt overwhelmed and exhausted and nothing like a mother, but I smiled and thanked them and introduced myself to this new foreign creature. I figured I should act like a mom, and the truth would soon follow, as it did with the teaching job. After the first few uncomfortable weeks, filled with frustration, poop, crying and constant checking-for-breathing, I finally felt confident saying that I was a mom.

So maybe the answer to my “attorney” quandary is that I need to fake it until I make it. If I represent myself as an attorney, maybe volunteer or do pro bono work, and continue to seek full-time employment, then the truth will follow and I will become the attorney I am pretending to be. Fingers crossed.