divine angst

It’s been a week since graduation, and I’ve been doing some thinking about the blogging thing.

First of all, this blog was initially intended to be about my “journey” through this law school adventure—application, admission, and all three years of being educated. And now that’s done. Oh, yes, I still have the bar to take, and I suppose that should be part of this blog’s story, but beyond that, I just don’t know.

See, over time, this blog became less about law school and more about just me, and I’ve felt sort of ambivalent about that. But law school qua law school became less interesting—it began to seem that writing about going to class, writing a paper, taking a test, and fulfilling my journal duties was just not what I wanted to be doing. Moreover, writing about those things really risked my anonymity.

And that’s the other thing. Sure, I’ve never really been anonymous—I know several of my fellow law student bloggers in person, and they know me. But we all sort of follow the code: if my name isn’t on it, we don’t really talk about it. I get the occasional email, the passed-on meme, even a side remark every now and then, but for the most part, my fellow bloggers (and students) have not really outright acknowledged that I write this blog. And I like that. I know they’re there, reading, but I also know they’re keeping it quiet, following the code.

But then (and, sorry Mom), my mom found me. I don’t know how, and I don’t really care, but I knew she was reading, and the tone of things changed because, well, she wasn’t a fellow law school blogger, and she wasn’t even a fellow law student. She’s my mom, and this was never really a blog I intended to write for an audience that included my mom. That’s not to say any of it is mom-inappropriate, it’s just that knowing she was there, reading, did something to my writing. And maybe that was good—after all, this was, again, never intended to be a blog about my life. It was supposed to be about law school. It became about my life, and I think knowing my mom was reading it made me less inclined to write about my life, and so I started posting less because, remember, law school is boring, so I didn’t have much to write about. This blog really needed to be about law school all along, and it needs to go back to being about law school. ^[1]

Except that I’m not in law school any more. I graduated last week, with my family here to celebrate, and now I’m about to start my summer job and bar study, and take the bar, and then start my full-time job . . . what is there to write about? Sure, Bar/Bri will have lots of fodder for blog posts, so I suspect I’ll keep going till that ends, and probably till I take the bar. But after that? I can’t write about my summer job, since I’ll be representing actual clients; I can’t write about my full-time job that starts this fall for the same reason (and also because, hello, I need the job more than I need to be fired for blogging about my firm).

So I think this is an early goodbye. In a few months, this blog will probably be gone. If it’s not gone, it will be dramatically different in tone (I am sending my big paper out for publication, and I can see that that process might be interesting to write about). But at some point, there’s just not going to be anything going on in my life that I can write about—either because it’s work, or it’s personal. And that will be that.

I’m not saying I won’t blog any more—I like the idea of it and, often, I enjoy actually doing it. But I want to get back to blogging on my terms—when I have something to write about, when I want to write about it, and when it fits into what I’m doing here (or wherever I end up writing).

1. I should note, too, that this forthcoming article from the NYTimes Magazine really says a lot about this topic that I think is valuable. Maybe my issue here is not the people who were/are reading my blog but just that I’ve gotten over this desire/need to expose myself. I’ve come to value my privacy a lot over the last few years where, I think in an earlier time of my life, I was much less circumspect about what I revealed about myself and to whom. ↩