This is basically the reason I ended up in law school.

Shyster: How I Went From Practicing Law to Living My Dream:

All of which led me to the same place it leads most people with my particular blend of talent, disposition and lack of ambition: law school.

For a time I reveled in my clients’ greed, avarice, frailty, absurdity and loathsomeness, viewing it all as great theater and job security.

I began to feel something else. Dread. Loathing. For my cases, my clients and eventually for myself. Maybe it was just because I was older or maybe fatherhood had changed me, but I couldn’t just sit back and laugh and mock like I had before. Bad people were doing bad things, quite often my job was to either defend or facilitate that, and I started to develop a pretty major problem with it.

Not that this led to some principled stand. I never made one. Instead, I internalized my discontent and dealt with it in other, less-than-healthy ways.

The point of all of this is that, even though I laid all of this out as the straightforward narrative of a boy who made his childhood dream come true, nothing in life is so simple. There are no definitive paths. There are no definitive beginnings. There are no definitive ends until the day we die. I’m doing this now. I wasn’t doing it before. I may be doing something else later. As all of that happens, other things happen. People come into your life and then leave. Others come into your life after that and, hopefully, stay. Those dreams you had once no longer hold currency. New ones crop up. No clear narrative of anyone’s life can be written until they’re dead and gone.

But what I’ve written over these past couple of months captures a chunk of it. An important chunk of it and one that will always be with me. And no matter where else life takes me, I will be able to draw on these experiences. To look back and say:

You once dreamed something big and made it happen. You once had big problems and overcame them. You once took risks that seemed unreasonable, but survived them. There is nothing you put your mind to that, with time, effort, perseverance and a little luck, you can’t accomplish. And even if that luck doesn’t come, you will be able to look yourself in the mirror with pride for having made the effort.