A Letter of Resignation

It’s taken me a long time to write this letter. Even as I am, I can imagine the eye rolls, the shaking of sadder but wiser heads, of my coworkers at the restaurant at which I have been working since I moved back in with my parents. The lifers who have been waiting tables for twenty, thirty years. The single mother who consistently requests extra shifts to pay for her child’s daycare costs. Maria,* who worked in the kitchen with her husband at my old restaurant back in Boston. I begged her to take a break during the dinner rush one evening; she was five-months pregnant and too sick to stand. But she shook her head furiously; she couldn’t afford to get herself or her husband fired with a baby on the way. Poor little rich girl, their looks would plainly say. You can’t find a job as a lawyer? At least you got to go to college in the first place.

And they wouldn’t be wrong, because for all of the struggles we share in common (or did, before I moved home) — prioritizing which bills to pay on the first of the month, pretending that I could only speak German when a collection agency called me (which the agent mistook for Spanish), foraging through the pantry for overlooked packets of Ramen noodles the night before payday — there is a significant dissimilarity between an underemployed law school graduate bartending on the weekends until she finds a “real job,” and a waitress wearing a 25-year service pin on the collar of her uniform.

While it is important to acknowledging my own privilege as a white, college-educated woman from a lower-upper class family, even relative to many of my peers, it is also imperative for me to speak up about something that is not only a problem for millions of twenty-something-year-old college graduates, but, to add insult to injury, for which we seem to be being blamed — underemployment.

Since graduating from law school, my parents have been subsidizing my monthly rental payments, first for a $900/month utility room at the end of Boston’s oldest and most dilapidated trolley line. This room is the fodder for “when I was your age stories,” stories that my grandfather’s generation says that I have no right to tell. I certainly didn’t live in squalor, and any discomfort I did have was due to my stubborn refusal to admit to my parents how little I had in my checking account. Still, it wasn’t where I had hoped to be a year or two out of law school. I was working two or three part-time jobs (only one was related to the law), volunteering with three different legal service organizations to minimize the growing gap in my resume, and attending at least one or two networking events each week (which at least guaranteed me free stuffed mushrooms or crab cakes for a meal). Eventually, and with no other options, I opened up my own practice and moved across the Charles River into the ground floor of a modest, recently renovated two-family home with my best friend from college. Almost immediately, I found myself falling behind on my bills. My clients were as skint as I was, and regularly were unable, or unwilling, to replenish their retainers (by $3,819.14 total, to be exact); even if I had had legal recourse against them (I had to request a judge’s permission to withdraw from a client’s case, and, if I demanded payment, my clients were certain to countersue, which would cause my malpractice insurance rates to skyrocket), there was no blood to be sucked from their proverbial stones.

And so, after waiting out the two-year forbearance period for my federal student loans (accruing over $22,000 in interest), maxing out my credit card on everyday items like paper towels and Pop-tarts, and embittered by the dilemma of providing legal services to the poor without being pulled straight into poverty myself, it was time to do the thing that most of my friends have had to do at one point or another — move back in with my parents.

For me, moving back home meant moving back to a tiny, conservative town in the Mid-South, hundreds of miles from most of my friends, moon cakes from Chinatown, and anyone who was a Democrat or Jewish. Even so, I was in a much better position than many of my former classmates and colleagues. My parents were able to afford to have me live at home and, more importantly, they were willing to support me in ways that many of my peers’ families were not. Some parents charge their children rent while they have to live at home for two or three weeks in between seasonal work, sometimes threatening to throw them out if they fail to make a payment on time. Older relatives interrogate them about their employment prospects at family reunions, offering outdated and impractical advice such as “why don’t you call and see if so-and-so is hiring,” well-meaning but unhelpful platitudes, or, worse, unsolicited opinions, such as why they had not simply worked part-time to pay for their college degrees. (Nevermind that in 1983, the year that my father graduated college, the federal minimum wage was $3.35/hr and the average cost of tuition for all higher educational institutions was $9,620/yr; today, minimum wage is $7.25/hr, while the average cost of tuition is $35,987.)

I am fortunate that my family does not subscribe to the “Old Economy Steve” way of thinking that approximately 51% of millennials are unemployed, or underemployed, because they are lazy or selfish or entitled, mooching off the sweat of their elders, instead of factors out of our control. My father slips gas money to my twenty-four-year-old cousin, who has lost 20 pounds while working three jobs since graduating from a prestigious university in Chicago last year. He listens sympathetically as we rant about receiving rejections from jobs to which we forgot we had even applied, but stops us before spiraling into too negative a headspace. My mother rubs my feet after a long shift at the restaurant and tells me stories about sharing a can of beets with her cat before moving back in with her own parents for a month in the early 80s. She refuses to allow me to feel like a loser or a ne’er-do-well or anything else the world might tell me that I am, not for even for a minute. And when the Board of Law Examiners denies my application to sit for the bar exam because I didn’t submit a copy of a single document along with my application (after I had called twice to confirm that it was complete, by the way), my grandmother makes me hot chocolate, squeezes me until I am hypoxic, and desperately rattles off solutions that come from a place of common sense, a place that, unfortunately, few lawyers inhabit.

In Arrested Development, one of my favorite TV shows, there is a recurring moment of comical exasperation when the main character sighs, tosses his hands into the air, and exclaims, “I don’t know why, but that’s it!” For me, that moment wasn’t when I received the decision from the Board of Law Examiners denying my application to sit for the summer exam; it was when I lost my first and only real job offer in three years as a result. Between the (mostly) nonrefundable exam fee and the bar review course, I had made a $3,189.88 mistake; an approximately $40K/yr mistake, if you take the job offer into account. Meanwhile, the interest on my federal student loans would continue to accrue; I currently owe $340,542.16 in federal student loan debt, plus an additional $5,067.70 in Federal Perkins loans. I was devastated, I was infuriated, I was despondent. I felt like a frustrated, spatially inept toddler attempting to smash a circular block through a triangular hole. I had been trying so hard to force something to work that simply refused to do so. After years of having almost everything I had, mentally, emotionally, and especially financially, sucked out of me by student loan officers, malpractice insurance carriers, law examiners, and despicable, unscrupulous clients who had higher incomes than I did, I was done with the legal profession — or at least the practice of it. I applied for a full-time bartending job and began to look for other ways to use my degrees.

As I come to the end of what I can best be described as a letter of resignation, a counter-narrative to the “millennials-are-entitled” mentality, and partly the petty rantings of “first world problems,” I am realizing that this entire experience of underemployment is shaping me into something that the idealistic, pseudo-intellectual who waltzed onto my college campus twelve years ago would never recognize. The chips that I proudly wear on my shoulder are cracking and splintering so that I am becoming a person who has become self-preserving and cynical. Someone whose sense of compassion is slipping away. When a client has called crying on the phone, I have found myself rolling my eyes at my officemate on more than one occasion. I have started to walk by homeless people on the street, assuming the worst uses for anything I would easily be able to give to them. And I have barely spoken to a family member in two years because he says that I am spoiled. I suppose that I wanted to share a story that, considering its commonness, I don’t hear being told often enough — at least in a human, non-statistical way to which I can relate. I wanted to invite an inclusive and supportive conversation from other millennials who are as frustrated and medicated and hopeless as I am at this particular moment. I wanted to send out an SOS signal to people who are much smarter than me, people who may have solutions, where I mostly have complaints. But maybe the most important thing I can do right now is to recognize that the bitterness that injects itself into my mind every time I wipe blue cheese dressing off of the bar counter is of no use, to me or to anybody else; I have to hold on to a little bit of that simple, sweet, freshman-year idealism, whether I am wearing an apron or a pantsuit. Otherwise, what was the whole point?