My executive function is so wildly inconsistent. There are times I can look at my past self and think “how on earth did I do all of that?” And then there are times I look at myself and think “what on earth am I doing with my time?"
At the end of law school, some nineteen (!!) years ago, I went with friends to Chicago. My then-boyfriend, now-husband was moving there for medical residency, and we went to the Lincoln Park Zoo and walked around.
Law school was a weird experience for me in a way. Many people say that law school is a weird experience, but I know very few people who had my particular weird experience in law school. Here is mine: I was lucky enough to understand what law school was asking for extremely quickly, and got exceptionally good at delivering it.
It didn't feel particularly praiseworthy of me to have done that; in fact, it felt kind of like having a cheat code where I had an answer key that explained what everyone was looking for, and nobody else did. It felt deeply unfair because I knew many people who worked harder, who got less, and who found that law school eroded their self esteem. Meanwhile, I had accolades piled upon me, and that made me feel…weird.
Don't get me wrong; it was a good problem to have and it opened up a slew of career opportunities that most people would die for. But it was weird. I failed out of college twice. I felt like a fraud, a stand-in for someone who looked like me.
A few days after graduation, I remember watching a pair of seals (I think, I'm not a marine mammal expert) swim around and talking with a friend from law school.
It was one of those exhibits where there was glass up against the pool of water, so you could see them swim underwater. It was effortless. There was a perfect economy of motion to them; they were swift and graceful, absolutely beautiful in the water.
My friend and I (who had had completely opposite experiences in law school) were both decompressing, and I remember looking at him and saying, “That's what law school felt like for me. It wasn't that I did anything special; I just happened to be a good match for the environment.”
Then one of the seals got out of the water.
Seals on land are hilarious. Big. Ungainly. Kind of bopping around on flippers that are not made for the full gravity of this earth. Whatever the opposite of “economy of motion” is, that's what this seal was on land.
I am both a person who felt like I did nothing in law school and got ridiculously good grades and also a person who failed out of college twice. I am economy of motion and also a big old blob of ambulatory seal meat. Both are necessarily part of me, and it's interesting to live in a world that wants to know how to classify people, who hears one set of facts about me and wants me to be brilliant genius and hears another set of facts about me and thinks that I'm a failure.
It was weird for me because I'd worn all the labels, and it was disorienting because I didn't see how the categorization could change so quickly. How did I shift so quickly from failure to success? Did it not mean that the very mechanism for judgment was somehow broken? What was I going to do when people figured out that I didn't fit?
It's been more than twenty years since I first encountered seal flow, and I've had more cycles of flow and stall since. I have thirsted for that feeling of seal flow in my lowest times, trying to figure out how to reclaim it when at my flapping clumsiest.
It has, I think, been a fruitless endeavor. The yearning for seal flow is a rush to approve someone else's categorization, to be worthy for someone else's flawed definition.
I do not need to take snapshots of myself every so often and examine myself for worthiness. Sometimes, there is economy of motion. Sometimes, there is flapping myself across dry land. Every seal has a place where they are most perfectly themselves; but every seal needs rest, and without those moments of ungainly oafishness, there will never be speed and beauty in the water.
It's all the same seal, flowing as best as it can.
