At some point you have to get out of here. The question is when – and whither.
A vacation might help, if you could achieve the impossible and take one. My client pulled off a week – seven whole days! – at a Caribbean resort, only to return feeling like a condemned prisoner.
“It made things worse,” she lamented. “Now I remember the outside world.”
Sometimes it’s better to live without that distraction.
You’re in it for the money. Biglaw creates money to toss into the maw of a bank. But no one can stand this abuse forever. Change – any change – might be good, right? How about another firm? Working in a different building – working with different people – different acoustic ceiling tiles, different vertical blinds, different sound-absorbent beige carpeting, different cheap wood veneer bookshelves, different anonymous windows to stare out… Anything different counts as change, doesn’t it?
The omnipresent worry: out of the frying pan, into…someplace worse.
Could anyplace be worse?
Isn’t that what you said about law school?
Another client took the leap and fled his firm – couldn’t take it any more. Guess what? It was worse. Two months later he was begging to return to the frying pan.
Yes – it actually happened. He returned to his old firm, proving forever there are places worse than the-frying-pan-you-know. There’s the-frying-pan-you-don’t-know.
This guy was a fifth year groping for an exit from hell. Nights and weekends of endless grind congealed into a determination – no más. Anything was better than this. This – whatever this was – was killing him.
An escape hatch appeared in the form of a nearby firm (five blocks away) celebrated for “associate satisfaction.”
I received an offer recently that I couldn’t refuse – an invitation from “legal search consultants.”
The People's Therapist 