We are so much more than our life on paper.

(I know this. And sometimes I still forget.)

I get asked a lot whether I considered doing a different lawyer job before I quit Big Law.

Which would be a totally reasonable and level-headed thing to wonder.

I, however, did not consider any lawyer alternatives 10 years ago.

When I realized I had to leave Big Law, I knew I had to … well, leave.

There is this one thing that happened though.

It took me about a year to quietly plot my escape from Big Law.

And in that 12-month timeframe, I was a rising fourth-year associate. That mid-level mark is where you start to feel this collective undercurrent of the “up-or-out” mentality of Big Law.

By this time, you can look at the data points you’ve gathered so far and have a sense of whether or not you’re on the partnership track.

And if you’re not moving up, the filtering out begins.

So a couple of times a week, most mid-level associates will field — on top of their mountains of billable work — calls from executive recruiters. Head hunters, appropriately named.

(Fun fact :: In college, I worked as an admin in one of these fancy NYC legal recruiting firms. Despite the warnings from the Big-Law-escapees we worked for, most of us young folks in the office went right onto law school & Big Law anyways. There seems to be some lessons we need to learn by doing ;)).

I never went on any interviews. But I did get as far as creating a resume at the suggestion of the recruiters, “justincase” I wanted to explore a more lifestyle-friendly firm one day.

And I knew — all the way back to my own headhunting days in college — that summing up your accomplishments and achievements on one piece of tidy paper really mattered.

The awards and accolades you received helped shine things up. The committees you sat on carried varying degrees of golden.

But the real currency: where you went to school, what judges you clerked for, and what Big Law firm you worked for.

All of these had real and specific point values assigned to them. And from the four-corners of a piece of paper, people could assign a certain worth to you, too.

So I wrote the resume. I tallied up my points. I never sent it out. But I kept a copy of the PDF.

After I quit Big Law, packed away all my pieces of paper — including the heavy framed ones that once hung on my office walls and have now collected a decade of dust in the attic of my childhood home — I stayed in DC to teach yoga and meditation.

Teaching yoga and meditation in DC was a little bit like selling hot dogs at the baseball stadium. Almost everyone in DC could use some stress relief. It’s a city fueled by pressure. The default pace is fight or flight. It’s an industry town that loves to ask, “So, what do you do?”

DC tends to lead with life on paper.

Except, it seemed, in the yoga studio. I loved getting to meet my people “after hours.” Sure, most would show up in some variation of business casual before changing into comfortable clothes they could move and breathe in. But after that quick change out of the armor, we could just BE. We came together. We collectively exhaled. We created a container for some grace and space. And we didn’t lead with our titles.

To be fair, I knew a lot of people chose my classes because some line in my teacher bio said “former lawyer,” and they came to me because there was a shared sense that my classes would be grounded in: “I get it. I see you. I did this dance. I’ll meet you there.”

But I could go for YEARS without ever knowing what someone did for work. Only to hear one day, down the line, that a longtime student was the “chief of something-something” or the “assistant / lead / head of XYZ department.”

No matter. We all loved putting down those badges of busyness during our time together.

Let me say something obvious here.

The pandemic was an inflection point in my work. Maybe yours too?

It was a collective moment — and perhaps just a moment — where we reimagined not only how we worked, but how work fit into the rest of our lives.

Whole industries — including Big Law, including yoga & meditation — went remote.

Pre-pandemic, I did 95% of my work in person.

I just so happened to have released my first virtual group coaching program in the Fall of 2019. But other than that — all the classes, the 1:1 coaching, the trainings, the retreats, the workshops, the talks — all of it, in person.

On the bright side, my husband and I used that door-wedge-of-a-quarantine-moment to leave DC. We’d said for years that “one day” we might try living in a quieter place. One with more green and space. Less hustle and fast-pace.

But by the time we landed in the Hudson Valley in July 2020, we had already shut down the virtual yoga studio we started the first week of lock-down from my parents’ living room in Pennsylvania. Fueled by adrenaline and the need for a quick pivot, by June we had completely burnt out. We looked at our marriage, our co-parenting of a toddler who had formerly been in full-time daycare, and our business and we knew: something had to go.

So we shut down the virtual yoga studio.

We had some really beautiful moments that summer and fall of 2020, exploring our new Hudson Valley home and managing to make real community in a socially-distanced time.

It was also incredibly stressful.

We were a husband-and-wife, small-business owning, self-employed couple who’s in-person industry was completely turned on its head. And we didn’t have the bandwidth to keep building something, together, remotely.

And so began the fights.

I look back on us now with a lot of compassion. We were in a pressure cooker. And exhausted. And not always handling the uncertainty and change with beauty or grace.

Our fights took on common refrains: “You get a job! No, you get a job!” (mostly him to me). And one of my favorites: “I’ll stay here! You take Lou 5 days a week and send me checks!” (me to him. I still don’t know where those checks were going to come from. I just wanted to be left alone to write in my 1790s Hudson Valley farmhouse instead of being the primary caretaker of my toddler and drowning in a particular sea of overwhelm and underwhelm that many working parents in that moment felt too).

The facts were obvious though: There were no checks to send. And, if there was one of us with a life on paper that could get a new, steady, even lucrative real job — it was me.

Suddenly, the solidity of my corporate lawyer days didn’t look so bad.

Suddenly, I was happy to have made that resume 6 years earlier — because there was no way, by that point in 2020 — that I could pull together phrases that showcased my skill sets and talents like “primary drafter of motion to dismiss in subrogation action by insurers in relation to gas blow explosion at nuclear power plant; obtained dismissal of action” or “managed document collection, review, and production in nationwide class action brought by hotel franchisees concerning alleged breach of contract and unfair trade practices; case voluntarily dismissed with prejudice following discovery.”

[ Footnote: in case it’s not entirely obvious, my firm tended to represent the nuclear power plants, insurers, and hotel franchise parent companies. ]

I have told VERY few people this.

But during those high-pandemic days, I printed out that resume. And I began to consider what a return to Big Law might look like.

I even — and I kid you not — interviewed, informally, with a private equity partner who was quarantining in Hudson about the possibility of returning to corporate law as a fourth-year associate.

Luckily, (luckily?), there was also a swelling tide toward “corporate wellness” during these days, and I was able to shift my work toward corporate wellbeing consulting.

I created programs and gave talks and did leadership development and executive coaching, no longer under the lens of “just” meditation and yoga, but under the more impressive-on-paper frameworks of mindfulness and stress management and burnout prevention and helping high achievers better navigate work/life balance.

To be sure, some of this work was fulfilling and meaningful.

But as I pushed harder and harder to present myself in this more corporate way again, I could feel — but yet not quite name — this underlying internal resistance to it all.

I mean, on paper, I was redoing my LinkedinBio. I was networking (virtually) in buttoned-up, professional circles again. I was getting new *beautiful* shots for my website … wearing a blazer!

Eventually, I was even recruited for the “Director of Well-Being” position at a Top-10 law firm. I should have known, when they scheduled my fourth-round interview on my due date for my second kid, that this was not going to be the right fit for me, beyond the match on paper. But even with that — man, I was bummed when the opportunity didn’t pan out.

2020 through the end of 2022 — It was a weird time for my work. (Perhaps for you too?).

And it wasn’t until recently, after a year and a half of reflecting on why it was so weird, I realized: I went back to my life on paper.

I led with that. I cared about seeming impressive and important.

But what I realize now : when I am trying to be impressive — leading with stats and data and resume lines and alumni connections — there’s no room for connection.

When I’m trying to impress, I simply cannot connect.

And the connection piece? Well that’s the work I came here to do.

And that’s not-so-easy-to-describe in black & white and fit onto an 8x11 rectangle.

And for a few years there, I totally forgot this.

Today, I’m mostly back to meeting people beyond their lives on paper.

The Hudson Valley, where we live and work now is filled with creatives, artists, makers, artisans, farmers, movers and shakers and change makers. So when I’m at a party and the topic of work even comes up at all, I’m much more likely to be chatting with a flower farmer or fine artist than the finance guy. (No offense finance guys ;)

I’m back to running a yoga and meditation studio and it’s all about connection.

And that resume? Well, it hangs on a bulletin board in my office, alongside other bits of memorabilia and pictures and inspiration that make up my life.

resume, in context —

---

I’ve got to place that piece of paper in context.

Because now I remember (though I may forget again) — we are so much more than our lives on paper.

And a resume can never hold the wholeness of who we really are.

There’s a below, a before, a beneath, a beyond our life on paper.

A richness, a dimensionality, a value, a worth to our SIMPLY BEING HERE.

Today, my living, breathing resume would read something like this …

Crop-top-wearing creative, decidedly approaching middle age. I teach people to make little beds and take little naps and I put people to sleep with the sound of my voice. Putterer and ponderer. Absolutely amateur gardener. Teacher. Conduit. Mostly barefoot. Prefers writing from bed with a heating pad. Space maker. Community shaper. Daily-morning-pager. Meditator. Mama x 2. Sister. Friend. Wife. Obsessed with beauty. Easily and often awestruck by the ordinary extraordinary in the everyday. Cuddler of my kids. Book reader. Deep breath taker. A forget-er and a remember-er. Retreat leader. Coach. Writer. Sometimes podcaster. Bath lover. Slow walker. Wild-flower obsessed. Seeker. Believer. Positively-average bread baker (whose warm bread & butter will be her forever party trick). Arranger of cheese, people, spaces. Cultivator. Embodied Leader. Learning to slow down, still and daily. Lover of silence. Extroverted Introvert. Outdoor enthusiast — namely sitting outside looking at something beautiful with my books, my notebook, my people, and a glass of wine. Deeply steeped and just getting started. Truster of myself. Curator of a vision.

Ok — now you go — write your living & breathing resume. What words might begin to hold the wholeness of who you are?

thank you so much for simply BEING here,
Cath

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