Saturday, February 12, 2011

About me

Imagine a stunning, confident woman in her late thirties who pairs naturally red locks with impeccable trouser suits and sleek heels.  She has two rosy-cheeked  toddlers, a boy and a girl, ages  4 and 2.   Our heroine, let’s call her Scarlett so as not to give away her true identity, is a full equity partner at a BigLaw firm in a City that shall remain nameless.  Endowed with a natural grace and resourcefulness, she manages to combine the demands of her professional life and her role as a loving mother with more ease than she had ever imagined possible.  Her husband, a successful artist and gallery owner, has a flexible schedule and can be counted on to take responsibility for the kids when her unpredictable work life has its way with her carefully planned agenda.
Got a picture in your head?
Ok.  Now imagine me.
I’m a mid-level associate in my late twenties at the same BigLaw firm.  Not quite dog, not quite supermodel.  At this particular point in time, I lack the husband, the full equity partnership and the pink toddlers, but I have a ten-year plan to get there one day.  Unlike Scarlett, I avoid high heels like the Plague and I suspect that I would scare the bejezus out of folks in red hair, but these are minor obstacles in my long-term quest for perfection.  I’ve worked long and hard to get where I am, from grade school to grad school, and have no intention of setting aside my dream or getting distracted from my goals.
Unless.
Unless a thoughtful, Clark Gable-esque man saunters over in my general direction and tampers with the oxygen supply to my brain.  Unless I suddenly find myself not enjoying cranking out billable hours every day of the week.  Unless another dream beckons, quietly, from afar.  The dream to write stories as I have done since the age of 5 when I first learned to put pen to paper.
But that is not the Game Plan.  The Game Plan is to make it big in BigLaw, which means not getting laid off in this current depressing climate, making senior associate and eventually partner, and living the dream.  After all, it’s what I was trained to do thanks to all those student loans I’m still paying off.  I might even become the female role model that I so desperately need for myself: a young woman who has overcome her natural inclination for self-doubt and who shines in a profession of men, all the while sporting smart power suits and red-painted toenails.
Doesn’t mean though that I can’t dabble in writing occasionally, say once a week.  Or every other day.  Or every day.  Depending on how many billable hours I have clocked of course.
Read this blog and follow my adventures as an undercover writer in BigLaw as I work out where I am and where I’m going.  My guess is as good as yours.  I wish I could scroll down and read the ending.
Secretly yours,
The Undercover Writer.

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