I’m Basing My Writing Career on Authenticity
I won’t use words to advance what I don’t believe in.
I was a lawyer for more than 20 years. The first five years were sort of fun. I worked as a public defender in a large city. A public defender is a lawyer that the cops tell you about when they read you your rights. It’s the lawyer that represents you when you are charged with a crime, and you can’t afford to hire a lawyer.
A lot of people think that public defenders are crappy lawyers who can’t get a better job. This isn’t true. In my experience, many public defenders tend to know the system and everyone in it better than other lawyers. As an accused person, you can benefit when your lawyer knows the system.
As a public defender, I worked with other lawyers who ended up becoming amazing friends. And the clients were overall pretty easy to deal with. The majority of my clients were decent people who knew that they were in trouble, and they just wanted my help.
After about five years of practicing criminal defense work, I stumbled into practicing family law. I was immediately sucked in because I was able to earn at least triple what I made as a public defender. I was having difficulty paying my bills, and I had a ton of student loans, so working in an area of law that would pay me more money seemed like a no-brainer.
Family law is an area of practice that encompasses things like divorce, custody, paternity, and child support. Basically, it covers disputes between people who now hate each other more than they once loved each other. I quickly learned that there is a fine line between love and hate, and there are no boundaries to how far people will go to hurt each other.
I didn’t enjoy that area of the law, or the other lawyers who practiced in it, or the judges, or many of the clients, but I figured I could learn to live with it. I needed the money, and I was sure that I would get a better attitude and grow to like it as time went on. It was probably just me. I would have to try harder.
The biggest problem for me was the clients. Clients came to me at one of the worst times in their lives and when they were the most messed up emotionally. A lot of them had no interest in right or wrong or civility. In general, the demanding clients wanted what they wanted, and they had no concern for who they hurt to get it. For some of them, inflicting emotional and psychological pain on others was the name of the game; that was their goal.
As their lawyer, my job was to advocate for them. I was required to use my words, both spoken and written, to tell their story in court. Unfortunately, many of their stories weren’t realistic or accurate. I would counsel them for hours, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t talk any sense into them; I couldn’t get them to see reality.
They had their script that they had written, and it was my job to convey that in the legal arena. Sometimes, that meant speaking in open court. Other times it meant writing documents that took hours to compose. For me, writing a bunch of garbage that I didn’t believe in was far more painful than going to court and being finished after making a five-minute plea to the judge.
Simply sucking it up and telling my client’s vengeful and deceptive story wasn’t easy for someone like me. I’m not wired that way. I prefer to use my words to help and not hurt. But in my job, I had no choice. I had to be fake every day. I felt like a total fraud. I couldn’t verbally obliterate another person; I couldn’t. And when I tried, it came off pretty weak.
When I didn’t argue aggressively enough in court, my client would usually fire me. That happened a lot. Sometimes, it was a relief when it happened. It was one less “performance” that I had to put on.
Being a lawyer had become my hell. I was void of all authenticity. Every day was another day of pretending to care and believe in what these clients who were miserable in their lives were telling me. I was forced to use my words, my voice, my insides to spew garbage. I hated it.
Now that I am no longer a lawyer, I am no longer obligated by an oath to advocate for others by telling their stories. I am no longer required to use my words to push someone else’s agenda.
Now, I can finally be authentic. To me, being authentic means being true to myself in my writing. It means being introspective, insightful, and reflective. It means that I realistically see my environment and circumstances. It means that I am honest and truthful in my writing.
All of those things benefit not only me but also the readers that I share my words with. Authenticity is the basis of a genuine connection with the reader.
Words, both written and spoken, have profound power. Use your words with care. When you write without authenticity, you are writing without integrity.
Linda Kowalchek is a work in progress and a member of the typewriter generation. She spends her time with her husband and her rescue cats waiting for golf balls to crash through their windows. PSA: Don’t live next to a golf course.