A Return to Writing

I miss writing.  So I'm happy to be back on here.  I'm hoping I can keep up with it.  I have so much to work through, particularly as my career is concerned, that I know that I need to write.  I can feel it in my bones.  It's like the feeling one gets after being sedentary for a good while, when the body finally tells the mind that it's time to get up and start moving around, get the blood flowing, feel alive again.  This is the same kind of thing, but it some ways it goes deeper than that.  It raises one of the big questions: what am I going to do with my life?  Not to say that I ought to dramatize it or make it more than it is.  But these intimations seem to be telling me: the times, they are a-changin'.

To finally verbalize these intimations, I must admit that I haven't been happy with my life at work.  There's a gender bias at PLA, both in assessing cases and also among the co-workers in my unit.  I believe that most of the time it's likely subconscious, or in other words, not intentional.  But my primary contention is that, after pointing it out, I've felt something like an outcast.  I ask myself if I've brought it on myself.  That's very likely, to a substantial degree.  But I also undoubtedly feel like the same undertones and cultural tenor continue.  And that tone is set, as it usually is anywhere else, at the top, here by our supervising attorney.  In fact, just the day before yesterday, at our weekly unit meeting this past Monday, one of the paralegals, a woman, asked our supervisor if our supervisor's assessment of a particular wasn't "sexist."  I'm tired of the emotionally draining environment.  Like a bad relationship -- one in which I feel bad to be who I am, one in which I am no longer growing, one in which I'm not even acknowledged for anything positive, but only criticized in the infrequent opportunities when I can be -- I believe it's time to cut the cord and move on.  My own mental and emotional health depends on it.  Due to the wholeness of life, Jeannie and those others in my life also deserve for me to be at least generally happy.  And due to the shortness of life, why stay in something that doesn't serve a positive purpose?

This externally imposed period of self-reflection leads me to ask even bigger questions, such as: should I even remain in the practice of law?  My outstanding student loans would suggest that I should.  The dreamer in me would suggest maybe not, maybe now is the time to do something else.  I also wonder: should I even remain in Philadelphia?  Again, the practical me would say yes.  But the dreamer in me would say, there's a whole world out there.  And I'm with a girl who would be with me no matter where we go.  For that, and for the blessing to be in the enviable position of having this first-world freedom, I'm very thankful.  I thank God and I pray that God guide me where I need to be.