You mentioned emotional stability, which I get, but it made me think of the meme about ‘how do you not cry when people yell at you’ and I’m wondering both: whether there’s as much yelling in law as in tv, and whether you’ve ever cried while doing law
Nowhere near as much yelling as TV!
The only people I've ever had yell at me are non-attorneys who are representing themselves and who do not understand how this whole system works, and generally speaking...they're not in a position where their yelling is hurtful? Every time it's happened it's been more like a person throwing a tantrum, and I just...can't take that seriously. No one I actually work with (or opposing counsel) has ever managed to yell at me. I have cut off a couple people who were working themselves in that direction and redirected things back to being civil.
Frankly: I will not put up with that shit.
The list of people who are allowed to yell at you in a professional setting is very, very short, and the circumstances where that is appropriate are few and far between. It does happen in some workplaces but that's a question of office culture and individual shitty temper. My boss would never yell at me--it's unprofessional--and if he did he'd have my resignation on his desk by the end of the day. Opposing counsel is not entitled to yell at me; I am their professional peer and I don't have to put up with it outside the courtroom, and if it's inside a courtroom, the judge is likely to shut that down.
We're lawyers. In this profession, it's widely seen that losing your temper is a sign that you have lost your professional regulation and it discredits your argument. That's true in and out of the courtroom.
I have come near tears in court, but mostly because if I hit a certain point of rage I will tear up. Twice, I've had a judge hand down a ruling so wildly unjust and unexpected that it threw me off balance and into immediate fury, but I've always been able to keep it together and carry on without actually crying.
Mostly the practice of law is just not that personal. Even if someone is yelling, it's not at me as an individual. I don't make the laws, I don't decide the facts, I just take these things and lay them out. If someone's mad, it's not usually a personal attack. And you learn to deal with and understand that kind of anger--often frustration--as you go.
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something about how both wei wuxian and jin guangyao repeatedly say they ‘didn’t have a choice’ in their actions. in both cases, it’s not literal impossibility, instead determined by their mindsets and personal conduct…. but while for wei wuxian that means he can’t do something immoral, even if it means losing all his social power, for jin guangyao it means he can’t do anything to lose his social power, even if it means doing something immoral. the other option is still there, but it’s never one they’d pick.
something about how they’re trying to walk the same path but in opposite directions: wei wuxian willingly left the nice, broad road in favour of upholding morals and debts, while jin guangyao is trying to claw onto it and stay there by any means necessary. in both cases, being parted from it so easily is only possible because this nice, broad road — full of people whose social power is unconditional, given at birth, independent of their actions — was never truly theirs to begin with. but despite how it is possible to be forced off due to nothing, as we see with wang lingjiao, the positions of both these characters were ultimately due to actions they took.
(about how no matter the similarity of the paths, no matter the narrowness of the choices, the direction you take is still up to you.)
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Something I've been thinking about over the past week is that Rachel's expectation over whose death would fuck Jake up the hardest vs. whose death actually fucked Jake up the hardest wasn't right, and how that says so much about their characters and how it also hurts really badly.
Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that Jake wasn't affected by losing Tom, because he very obviously was. Tom was his entire reason for joining the war in the first place and part of him held onto hope until the end that Tom could still be saved. And I'm also not saying that Rachel didn't think Jake didn't care about her at all, because that's not true either. She knows Jake does, but that he's doing what he has to do.
But when you think back to the conversation they have when Jake gives her the assignment, and he tells her that he won't have a way out for her, Rachel's concern for him isn't how her death would affect him, but Tom's. "It won't just be the yeerk. It'll be Tom." And while she acknowledges that of course Jake doesn't want her to die in her opening narration in book #54 and is making this call because he has to, at the same time there isn't a sense that Rachel thinks her death is going to be the one to hit him hardest here. It's Tom's, she's sure of it. Emotionally, Jake could afford to lose her, but Tom? That one gives her pause.
But one year after the war . . . again, Jake does still mourn Tom, obviously. He carries the guilt and grief of everything. But one of the strongest images of #54 that has always stuck with me is Jake sitting at Rachel's grave for several hours at a time, after hours, with regularity. It sticks out to me because you know Tom must have had a grave or memorial as well, I'm sure Jake's parents would've had one set up, but in all of Marco's stalking he doesn't see Jake sit and visit with it. Jake doesn't visit Tom. He visits Rachel.
And it just, to me, speaks to a complete subversion of Rachel's expectations, which were predicated on her own perception of how the rest of the team saw her. They "loved [her] in their way" but she was also a monster, blood thirsty, the garbage disposal, the one to do the dirty work. And she was as fine with that as she wasn't. (It was the biggest point of inner conflict for her—the war between her fear and her need to appear brave, her need to protect her friends from the gruesome vs her revulsion at what her actions said and made her out to be, etc.) Jake cared, sure, but also he saw her as a blood knight who might as well die in battle because that was her role, that was what SHE did, better her than anyone else on the team. Jake knew that, it would help him recover from his correct choice, far more than he could ever recover from losing Tom, who—unlike Rachel—was wholly innocent.
But Jake didn't recover. Because yes, he loved Tom and Tom was a wholly innocent victim from day one. And Rachel was overtly aggressive, and reckless, and part of her scared him, as much for her as anything else. But also, he talked to and fought and bled beside her for three traumatizing, agonizing years. They saw the best and worst of each other. Jake left her in charge when he had to leave on that trip. They talked about leadership after, about hard choices, understood each other on a level that would lead to that final choice in the last battle. Rachel couldn't see it because she couldn't see her value in the team as anything other than the brute and garbage disposal, but she WAS more than that, to Jake. She meant so much more to him than that, and it hurts so bad that she didn't realize it.
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