originally composed as I was driving to work, then lost by the time I arrived, and reconstructed several weeks later
early july 2025
I haven't felt rested, properly, since I started my full-time job. It's not that I'm not sleeping enough --- it's that either the sleep is low-quality, or it was fitful, or even when nothing appears wrong I'm still tired.
I've started to count my life only as being the time I spend outside of work --- waiting to come home, living for the weekend. I sever my work-life existences so thoroughly it's often hard for me to remember what I was doing at the office that day.
Recently, Tala wrote, "your life is not a prequel." But I want it to be. I feel so hopeless, and stuck, in my day to day. Someone asked me, recently, if I had anything I looked forward to. I answered honestly, and said nothing. I try to focus on moving to Germany, on the fact of this being temporary. I imagine myself sitting on the U-Bahn, writing as I commute to a job in Munich. I imagine what everyday office rhythms might be like when I am a foreigner in Germany.
I don't want this to be all there is.
My mother keeps telling me that the first job out of college is never satisfying, that it's just a stepping stone. I hope so. In June I spent my free time researching what it takes to go to law school in Germany – the specific requirements of a degree, the logistics of it. Germany is in the midst of reforming its system of legal education, and there are multiple tracks one can take – although the shortest path, the 3-year bachelor's in laws, leaves you with significantly more limited career options than the traditional path to being a "full" lawyer (Volljurist), which takes seven years. Seven years. The first five of those are spent taking classes and preparing for the first civil exam (Staatsexam), after which one is called a Diplomjurist. But you only get two tries for that exam – if you don't pass on either attempt, it's over.
The more I learn about German law school, the more I have the sense that non-native speakers are simply doomed. Twenty-five percent of students who take the first state exam, across Germany, fail --- and nearly all of those, I assume, are native German speakers.
I wouldn't be intimidated by law school if it was law school in my native language. But my language skills --- while good enough to read literature in or hold down an ordinary job --- are not even close to the level of piercing clarity needed to analyze complex legal arguments, much less write them. There was a woman in my German-as-a-foreign-language class, abroad, who was studying Jura (law), but she disappeared partway through the class and never resurfaced. Maybe this was the reason. At the level we were both at, it wouldn't have been possible to successfully make it through one's studies. There is no room, in law, for linguistic misunderstandings.
I attended a family gathering several weeks ago, and people kept asking me what's next, now that I've graduated college. For the first time in years, I had to tell them I don't know. I'm trying to work towards what I want. It's just that "what I want" seems so unfeasible.