Today’s song: Simple Man by Lynyrd Skynyrd
At the beginning of this summer, I was carrying a suitcase and a duffle bag full of clothes into my parents’ house when I scraped my foot on a rock. Not a big deal, but I had kicked off my shoes on my first trip inside, or maybe I had left them in the car, and now instead of just stumbling, I was bleeding. And my first response to this was to be super angry at this rock. How dare it be in my way when I was clearly moving with a purpose? My second response was to worry about my feet.
I never wore shoes when I was a kid, outside of school. When I was in high school, I perpetually lost my shoes. I had at least three pairs of flip flops in rotation between my room, my car, and the purgatory of lost shoes that was the rest of my house. Consequently, I could walk across hot asphalt and gravel and not really mind much. I liked my durable feet. They make me feel mountainy, in the way that only cool summer grass between your toes can.
But that all changed when I went to college. Suddenly things were gross, the ground most of all. And I don’t blame myself for thinking that- college campuses are not the most sanitary of places. Shoes are preferred. And then I had a job and I needed to look respectable often and eventually, shoes became the norm. I barely walked out to my car barefoot and while some shoes still ended up in shoe purgatory, it was because I’d switch my flip flops for flats when going into the office. So when I came back home at the beginning of this summer, my feet belonged to some kind of pansy city girl who had never played in the red dirt of the North Carolina foothills. I’m not sure how to deal with that.
But I can’t wax totally nostalgic about who I used to be. When I think back to my personality in middle school and high school, I was so full of myself. Not in a particularly prideful way, just that socially, I was stuck inside my head. I know now that there were many things going on that I had no clue about and there was a lot of comfort and caring that I could have given if I had ventured outside of my bubble. At the same time that my feet were getting callouses, my heart was staying locked up and pristine. I sobbed once in high school, in the middle of a particularly difficult week at the overnight summer camp I worked at then. While I know that crying isn’t a great indicator of emotional maturity or lack thereof, I’m convinced that I didn’t bother to feel all that much in high school.
What worries me about potentially being a lawyer, or going to law school and then pursuing a career that uses that degree, is that I would end up needing to be a combination of two parts of myself that I don’t particularly like to be: the part with pristine feet and the part with a pristine heart. I would need to be professional and business-like in the majority of my interactions and I would need to stop myself from caring too much about any one client or story. I already have a baby face, so I’d have to dress up, and caring too much would make me ineffective, so I’d have to suck up my new-found emotions. There might come a day when I forget my mountains.
Of course, that’s not a solid argument for why I shouldn’t do something. If I’m passionate about whatever it is I’m doing, my footwear won’t matter and we’ll figure out the emotions. If I have a cause, I can mold myself to be its champion. That’s honestly what’s so appealing about law school- there are so many causes waiting for champions, or backup champions, or support for the champions, and being a contributing part of any tidal wave like that is, well, exciting.
But I don’t have to have law school for that. There’s always Big Block of Cheese Day.
(Bonus points for the Cartographers for Social Equality).
