Secret Life of a Lawyer #5: To Find or Deny Love

I have thought about these series every day for 45 days and came very close to deleting all of the series. There were many reasons for it, one of which was the fear and the fact that I would be misjudged. And I was – but mostly by loving people wondering if everything is OK. I never heard one vicious or evil feedback after I wrote those blogs. I also met so many incredible people, both offline and online who wrote to me and resonated with me. I thank my lucky stars for being vulnerable and taking the risk to write. These people are the reason I decided to continue writing and not letting fear get in the way.

So without further a due, here is part 5:

Wanting to Leave the Practice of Law

The night I wanted to leave the practice of law, I was at rock bottom and being pulled up by my family. I had felt so empty for so long.  I always felt like I was not good enough. Validation from others was the only thing that would get me a temporary fix and had become a necessity.

I would downplay or even leave the people who genuinely loved me. I would go after people who did not or could not love me, and I’d spend days, months and years trying to convince them otherwise. My attention was on the unworkable, the negative, the unattainable, the unhealthy and the abusive.

Lawyers Must be A Type Perfectionists

Many people become lawyers because they want to be validated constantly and be seen as worthy – by judges, their own clients and friends/family. I was one of them.

Being “A-Type” or a perfectionist in the legal profession is rewarded and even expected. If you don’t try hard enough or outsmart someone, you are not good enough. Your job is to impress, at all times. That means you had to run, at all times. Stopping meant someone else would get ahead of you and that was not an option.

That lawyer, that running champion in me was born and motivated by the insatiable thirst for validation. The feeling that I was not good enough made me try so hard I achieved more than I imagined in my wildest dreams. But still, that was not enough. Nothing was. My prizes from running and every achievement after that were temporary highs which made me want to achieve more and run more.

I had been running fast for a reason, and for years. I could not run anymore because no matter how much I ran, things did not get better. I had fallen to the ground and had too many injuries. I was not about to get up and was about to give up. That’s when my family grabbled my hands and held me up, talked to me, helped me and gave me the kind of love I could not deny no matter how much my brain told me otherwise.

That night I realized something in me wasn’t right. Which was the first and hardest step towards facing myself.

My Pain Made Me Become a Lawyer

Repeat after me. Say it out loud: I feel like I am a failure. I feel like I can never be good enough. I can never achieve enough. I feel like I often have no control. I feel bad taking time for myself.

My psychologist wanted me to say out loud what my inside was telling me so that I could realize how absurd I was sounding. I was attacking myself. And I didn’t know why. I said those words out loud and my head started spinning. That was the first time I started paying attention to myself.

For the next year, I expressed, relived and grieved many past experiences that my brain had blocked or escaped. I was a child of war. I was born and raised in it (the Persian Gulf War). Because of whatever it had done to me, I actively looked for relationships that were destructive. Romantic, work-related or even with myself.

The source of my trauma however was irrelevant. What mattered was how I felt and how I could heal myself.

Learning to Love Myself

The more I grieved, the most space I opened up. I reached out to myself. I started accepting that I am a human being and I have imperfections. I began to accept my limitations. I started giving myself the compassion I gave to my clients.

I cut out destructive relationships. It didn’t happen overnight. Those relationships existed with my clients, the romantic relationships I had and in friends. Letting go of the negative was difficult because I had gripped onto it for so long thinking it will help me somehow. I am also one of those people who can’t cut things out quickly. For me, change is a long process, not an overnight thing. And it takes a lot of try, effort and time.

I reduced my workload and felt uncomfortable the entire time doing it. Change wasn’t easy and many times I stood up and resisted the sounds inside of me that I had always listened to. But the most liberating thing I found during the entire process was letting myself trust me and accepting that I can rely on myself to make the right decisions. To do that, I had to stop caring about what other people thought or said.

When I relied on myself, I made fewer mistakes and was generally much happier. If I did make mistakes, they never really hurt me in the long term. They actually helped me. What hurt me was allowing others to make decisions for me and directing me despite not knowing me as much as I knew myself.

My Solution Was Not Closing My Law Practice

I started listening to the passion inside instead of burying it and not believing it. Passion is a different thing for everyone. It is basically what your heart tells you to do every day but you don’t listen to it or run away from it because you are afraid.

My passion may be different than yours. For me, it laid in expanding my business and giving out free information to those who needed it. I started sending that energy out and I got results back 4 fold and in a very short amount of time. I reduced the lawyering and focused on being creative with my business.

In the past 8 months, YLaw has grown from 2 to 8 people. We are aiming to go up to 12 people by the end of the year. We have moved into a new office in Yaletown and are just putting finishing touches to our incredible renovations.  The best part of it is the person who is doing the renovations.

He is the blue-eyed Irish soul who I met after ending a relationship that was a product of my old me and damaged me. My jolly architect came into my life when I finally stopped looking for someone to love me and placed my faith in me and life and whatever it brought to me. A couple of nights ago, I couldn’t sleep worrying about the unknown future. He gently held me and I fell asleep in his arms in seconds. I think he is a keeper.

I still struggle sometimes. It is a mistake to think stories end in fairytales because they don’t. I struggle with many things everyday and life takes many different twists and turns. This blog is not meant to be a feel-good story making you feel like my life is different than yours and my challenges have ended. They haven’t. And yours won’t either. My challenges exist every minute of every day. I have just learned to understand them instead of fighting them. The more I become aware and give myself love instead of blame, the less I suffer.

I will continue to write because just like you, I am a vulnerable but curious soul out there who believes talking is better than hiding, especially as a lawyer. Talking will allow me and you to connect to each other and realize we are not alone. And as different as we may be, sometimes we experience the exact same thing.

Thank you for being a part of my journey and here is me, the champion runner:

Written by Leena Yousefi – [email protected]

To read how this all started go to Part 1: click here.

To read part 2 on addiction,  click here.

For Part  3 on the climax, click here.

For Part 4 on pleasing, click here.

For Part 6 on bullying at the workplace, click here. 

For Part 7 and my transformation, click here.