do i know you?

i wish i could get frequent flyer miles from the psych services office at wardenburg health center. i'd be owed a trip to cancun by now, maybe even paris. or at least a smidge of sanity. i'd take that any day.

i am one of the bajillions of law students on anti-depressants. too bad i don't have real figures on that, but i'd bet my dog's ass that there are more people medicating in law school then there are in the top 25%. i read somewhere recently that more than 40% of law students report feeling depressed by the end of third year. and while the rates decline post-graduation, they never return to levels enjoyed by the population at large.

what's my point? well, between all my different medications and vitamins and painkillers for the inevitable library headache, my backpack sounds like a baby rattle. and the medication, generally, has helped a hell of a lot. i'm pretty comfortable admitting that i need a pharmacological cocktail just to stay sane. cuz i remember the alternative all too well.

so why, then, when i ran into a law schooler last week at wardenburg, did i pretend to be invisible? i've seen fellow fleming rats there before, and it's usually been cause for laughter: "tough row to hoe, eh?" but i never thought this person would need psychological care. i didn't want this person to know i saw him/her, so i ran off. not so much because of my own shame, but for fear of theirs.

this strikes me as funny now. is this person not supposed to get depressed, to sweat a bit in the lion's pit? like it's ok for me to be there, because i'm prone to thinking m'self a low life, but it's not ok for someone else? then i realized: this is a lot like all the other calculations i've been doing in my head this week. sitting in my classes, trying to compute who is smarter or more type-A than me so as to predict where i'll fall on the curve. it's a kind of mental darwinism we all engage in, an attempt to locate the fittest and then plan our studying rituals accordingly. and i've apparently become so good at this law student taxonomy that i've also factored in who is more mentally stable or unstable than i.

it's a sick ritual, i know. i also know i'm not alone in it: it was part of the OCI dance; it was there in the l/s application process; it'll be part of the summer clerk experience and of firm life thereafter. in this conformist world of lawyering, each of us will be measured against a rigid norm (does she golf? did he go to all the social events? did she bring an extra jacket to work?) , and we will measure others against that post. if not, we'd be unable to find our own place on the invisible hierarchy of professional life. so perhaps we shouldn't pull so hard against the academic mean to which we're tethered these three years of law school. because we help create it as it creates us.

or, maybe we should just stop giving a fuck and love people for the work they do and the people they are. so with all cynicism aside: i wish you much luck next week.

and with all cynicism intact: i plan on falling below the mean in corps, above it in legislation, and right on it in ethics. feel free to calculate accordingly.