2021-Back from "Break"!

Hello Jury of Peers!

To be honest, this wouldn’t be an honest blog post if I didn’t note the fact that winter break felt very little like a real break. Obviously, breaks in law school are much shorter (I used to be on a semester system where we used to get SIX weeks off between semesters. SIX!) even though finals feel much longer and a lot more draining (the hard work pays off though, I promise you!). But also, it was difficult to take a break with everything going on in the world. There wasn’t much to do to relax or unplug and the thought of job searches and the start of semester never left my mind.

Long story short (if you know, you know, TS fans), I did not do this break right. The weekend before classes started, I still felt tired. But there was one silver lining; and that was the realization that I need to spend more time disconnecting throughout the semester. I love law and legal thinking, but over break I realized that I had started to think that way when it came to every aspect of my life. I couldn’t have a conversation without approaching it like some argument or like I was meant to derive some idea or rule from it. That’s definitely exhausting for my brain and it was something I hadn’t even noticed. The break gave me a chance to become mindful of that and reminded me that sometimes it’s fun (and necessary) to just do unproductive, creative and mindless things. To just not think.

So if you’re reading this and you haven’t had your first winter break yet, I have a couple of things to say. One, fingers crossed you won’t be in a global pandemic. Second, I hope you can rest your mind, even if you can’t fully rest and re-energize yourself the way you wanted to. It goes a long way.