It’s always an interesting and enlightening experience when you hear your own thoughts coming out of somebody else’s mouth. And when those thoughts are negative ones, it’s a comforting feeling as well.

One things I’ve learned as an unhappy lawyer is that there are a lot of us out there, but that few people are willing to talk about it. So we suffer in silence, together, but alone.

I had this experience twice this week, which is why it’s on my mind. The first one came from the Lawyers with Depression blog:

It seems to me that lawyers with depression seemingly disappear from life. They have the appearance of being present, but they really just aren’t.

They sit at their desks and look like they are doing their jobs, but inside they are someplace far away…

They are scared to death. They know that there is something seriously wrong with their lives and that it’s not going away. Their life, on a fundamental level, isn’t working. It is broken. They can’t concentrate. They are getting behind in their work. … Driven by these fearful redheaded demons, they go into hiding. They disappear. They close their doors and surf the web trying to distract themselves from the pain of depression and the long list of things they need to do for work which just aren’t getting done…

Many lawyers disappear because they feel a deep level of toxic shame; that they are to blame for their depression. They feel as if they are a big fat zero and deserve to disappear into . . . nothingness. Shame isn’t the same as guilt. Guilt is usually understood to involve negative feelings about an act one has committed, while shame involves deeply negatively feelings about oneself.

What resonated with me was the emphasis on fear as the key emotion in lawyers’ lives.

And then, I saw this post on the leave law behind blog:

We unhappy, dissatisfied, unmoored attorneys want “it” to click, we want the aha moment, we want an answer…

We want the guarantee that if we leave the law we’ll get that cool job…

We want the guarantee that if we leave the law we’ll be happy and satisfied.

We want the guarantee that we won’t be afraid.

In short, sure we will leave the law, we say, … if we can be certain that we’ll get that something else.

But since that guarantee is often hard to manifest, we don’t feel safe leaving the law. We’re afraid of what can happen if it all goes wrong. We’re afraid of the unknown. So we don’t take any steps to leave.

I think this is the general state of mid-level BigLaw associates. We’re unhappy, ashamed, dissatisfied. We do not love what we’re doing. How could we? The system is designed for us not to love it.

But what do we do next? Just as we are entering our thirties, as we are supposed to be getting to that stage where we have things figured out, everything becomes unmoored. So we end up paralyzed by our terror. We hide. Alone in our offices, suffering together in silence.