Secret Life of a Lawyer – Rule #3: Thou Shall be Unhealthy

Secret Life of a Lawyer: the brutal, raw, honest truth. All of this happened. 

You are going to die. Look at me, if you go on like this you are going to die. , said my concerned, pregnant sister who happened to be a doctor.

I was trying to explain to her what had happened to me a few days back.

I woke up at 2 a.m. feeling like thousands of ants have attacked my body. I had another 30 minutes to sleep before I had to wake up at 2:30 a.m. and work through the night until tomorrow morning when I had to go to court and make my arguments. But an hour before the insane itching happened, I had once again been through on of the most mentally painful experiences I ever had as a human. An experience that repeated itself everyday for more than a year:

The Shocks

I tried to go to bed at 1 a.m. after working all day and all night. The anxiety of having to wake up in 1.5 hours in itself didn’t help me sleep. I decided to meditate. Take myself to Little Beach in Maui where the ocean felt like silk. I’d let the waves throw me around like I had no weight, no existence, and nothing to feel except the sheer kiss of the sun on my face and the wild energy of the waves making me feel like I was so small, yet so loved. So protected. So unquestionably accepted no matter who I was. I was perfect just the way I was. I was perfect just for being a human in the waves.

As I drifted in the waves of my dreams, I found peace for a few short seconds. As the beautiful thought of a good night sleep took me over, within seconds, an ugly, unwelcome rush took over my body again. It started in my tummy and moved quickly to my heart. It felt like an electric shock jumping my body right back in the seated position on the bed. I opened my eyes to myself breathing heavily, like I was suffocating. My eyes were bewildered, my breath short, sitting half way up on my bed trying to figure out what had just happened. Every time I tried to drift away, this torturous rush would send me flying back to full alarm mode. It wouldn’t let me rest.

The room was dark…my eyes wanted so badly to close and drift away again. But they couldn’t. I had 30 more minutes. Please God let me sleep I have no energy. Please God, I need the next 30 minutes because I will have to be up for 14 hours straight writing my argument and then going to court to talk about it. I need my rest. Please let me sleep…I couldn’t.

I dragged myself to the washroom to wash my face. I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize myself. My eyes were covered with pink, dry skin and I couldn’t properly open them. Later I found out this was once again eczema resulting from stress. But that night, my eyes would get no mercy. They were about to be once again violated with the glaring light of my laptop in the middle of the night giving my brain a few seconds before forcing it to work full speed for the next 14 hours.

Secret Life of a Lawyer – Thou Shall Get No Mercy

‘Your honour, we have now had 2 weeks of testimony and trial. May I please ask that you give us one business day to review 8 days worth of evidence and notes, condense 8 days of testimony in to a written statement, find the relevant case law, relate it to our facts and then analyze everything down in to a 50 page, single spaced submissions with no spelling or grammar mistakes? And then prepare ourselves with the answer to any question you may have so we don’t look stupid for not reading your mind? I doubt I could do all of that by tomorrow morning. It is now 4:30 p.m., I have had no food, and we have already had a full day of court.. and I only slept 3 hours last night’, that is the long format of what I asked the judge but the message was the same. I said this earlier that day in hopes of sleeping tonight.

No Ms. Yousefi, I will not allow it. You will not have one day to prepare yourself for final submissions of a 2 week trial.

So here I was that night being denied a chance to sleep properly. Those shocks meant that my body and brain constantly felt like they were under attack because of the hostility and the animosity I dealt with every day at work. As soon as I would try to relax and let the guard down, a rush would take over my body to wake me up and put me on alarm mode, thinking it is helping me survive. Most people feel this alarmed a few times in their lives. I was on this mode every single day. And it took such incredible toll that my body reacted in the worst ways imaginable. Yet I refused to acknowledge it for so long because I was not a failure. I was invincible. I was special and I should never complain or talk. Talking about it means I’m weak.

Why did I do it?

I promise you it wasn’t the money. I was raised in a modest, intelligent family who did not place much worth on money. I never worried about money and it never worried about me. Money and I had enough respect for each other to never cause problems for each other. We were chill.  I knew full well that I could be doing something else and become successful at it. I knew I could always make enough money to be happy. I never had a doubt in my abilities because I always felt like a special soul. I understood people, I understood businesses, I knew the worth of honesty and I took pure joy in helping people. I loved to love and loved to be loved. Then why did I choose to be a family lawyer? Why did I choose to do this and risk my health?

I kept on wanting to and being a lawyer for two reasons:

1. I loved helping people; and
2. I had to be validated because I never felt good enough.

I can protect people in pain in ways that others can’t. Or don’t have the capacity to. I specially care about children and will do anything I can to protect and assist them. This means protecting them in times they are susceptible to danger. I felt like I had an obligation to my world to do the best I can to help. That’s cause I always felt that a higher being protected me and blessed me in way I could not imagine or count. That is why I felt I had to give back and not complain about it.

I also so badly wanted to feel validated by others. No matter how much I achieved, it was never enough. I was never good enough. I often felt like the biggest failure despite how people looked at me. The fact that I didn’t love myself meant that it was OK to damage and hurt myself. It meant that I wasn’t worthy and therefore deserving of the fact that:

1. I hadn’t slept properly in more than 3 years;
2. Everyday I woke up to eczema in different places on my body;
3. Almost everyday I had headaches that would make it impossible to stand up and I had to lay down — but read the latest case law on my legal arguments;
4. Every night and everyday I had moving pain that migrated throughout my body and no one knew why. I could never sleep soundly because my body would hurt even lying on the bed.
5. I had nausea on a daily basis, often unable to hold it together even during court hearings;
6. I had random, break out itches that would wake me up multiple times a night desperately trying to calm my nerves down;
7. At 33, I developed a Thyroid problem which required me to be on pills for the rest of my life. At 33, the only cause of a thyroid problem is pretty much stress and nothing else. If it was genetic, it would have happened earlier;
8. I had a beating heart that would send me into survival mode multiple times a day and night;
9. I all the sudden grew allergic to those I loved, my beloved pets- both of whom I had to give away because I couldn’t stand being around them anymore. No matter how much I loved them;
10. I had panic attacks and extreme anxiety;
11. I had the perfect body, the perfect flat tummy, the perfect muscles because the pain made me want to work out to forget it. I didn’t work out to enjoy it. I worked out because I had to. Because I had no other choice and I was in pain.

100 Pounds

I was down to 100 pounds. My mother came by my apartment one night to drop off a crap ton of food she had cooked with love.. and when she saw me she broke down in tears. ‘I don’t recognize you..you look like a skeleton”, she said sobbing.

My weight loss was the easiest part of this. The hardest was knowing I will very soon get cancer with the way I was going. And I was going to die.

At 9:30 a.m., I finally sent my argument to my assistant at work who was eagerly waiting to print it and send me on my way to fight one of the biggest battles of my career in court. I fought it. And won it. But in the process, I lost a part of me that I will never get back. Was it worth it?

Not anymore.So why was my family trying to stop me from getting out?

Leena Yousefi – [email protected]

(This is part 3)

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

To read part 2 on addiction,  click here.

For Part 4 on pleasing, click here.

For Part 5 on how it all ended, click here. 

For Part 6 on bullying at the work place, click here. 

For Part 7 and my transformation, click here.