Why I Quit Practicing Law—and Why I’ll Never Give Up My License

This essay appeared in the November 19, 2016 issue of the Oklahoma Bar Journal. It can be found at the following link (you'll need to scroll all the way down to page 2392): http://www.okbar.org/Portals/13/PDF/OBJ/2016/OBJ2016Nov19.pdf

Why I Quit Practicing Law—and Why I’ll Never Give Up My License

Nothing had equipped me for law school. Despite having graduated with honor from college, I was totally unprepared for the sheer volume of work and intense stress levels law school threw at me. By the end of first semester I felt that my mind would not hold one single additional piece of information. I had no idea how I would make it through another five semesters—I only knew I had to. Not because I absolutely had to be a lawyer, but because there was no way I could ever justify having put that much effort into something only to throw it away.

Thirty years later, I still feel the same. Nonetheless, a few years ago, I decided to close my practice and reclaim my artistic side, which was all but lost when I gave up music for law school.

The decision to stop practicing law wasn’t easy. My law practice, small though it was, represented a series of hard-won victories—and I don’t mean the kind fought in a courtroom.  My career started out slowly, derailed by a devastating car wreck that almost killed me two weeks after the bar exam. Jobs for recent graduates were scarce; jobs for a recent graduate in a wheelchair who couldn’t work 40 hours a week, much less 70, even scarcer. I had to find my own clients, one at a time.

Personal injury was a natural choice; I knew the plaintiff’s side all too intimately. I helped injured people and I felt good about it. As I healed, my practice grew. But over the years, civil law seemed to grow less civil. I became disillusioned.

Then I began to write. Late at night, there were no anxious clients or obnoxious insurance adjusters. The only sound was the quiet tapping of keys as ideas flew from my fingers, sprouted wings and soared over the page. It felt almost like falling in love—the breathless anticipation of not knowing where the words would go, only that, once written, they took on a life of their own. After a while, I had to admit it was what I needed to do for a living.

People don’t always understand what I do, so I describe it this way: I’m a freelance writer and blogger for publications, corporations, and professionals—anyone who needs writing help with online content, especially lawyers. For fun, I also write songs and occasionally gig for tips, singing and playing piano. It’s good to hear the muse again.

Though there were many things about practicing law that I enjoyed, closing my law practice allowed me to find a part of myself that I had lost. And as long as I pay my bar dues every year, I can still call myself a lawyer. Being a lawyer is who I am, whether I practice law or not. I worked too hard earning that title to ever give it up. 

Health Savings Accounts: Stop Fearing High Deductibles and Start Saving

It seems these days that no one can agree on what to do about US health care coverage. The one thing everybody can agree on, however, is that the cost of health care and health insurance keeps going up. Premiums, deductibles, co-pays, non-covered expenses—it all adds up to a very expensive attempt to stay healthy.

As health care costs explode, many people are looking to lower their health insurance premiums with higher deductibles. While premiums on high-deductible plans are more affordable, the large deductibles can make depending on your health insurance for coverage scary. One way to pay for deductibles and other expenses not covered by those high-deductible health plans is with a Health Savings Account (HSA).

What is a Health Savings Account?

HSAs were created by the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act to help individuals save for qualified medical expenses on a tax-free basis. You can also use the money in your HSA for certain other health services your policy doesn’t cover—like those pesky co-pays—and as a savings vehicle for retirement.

Why You Should Consider HSAs

The “savings” in HSAs covers more than merely hoarding some cash for a rainy day. Here are some important ways a Health Savings Account can help you save money both short- and long-term.

1. Tax-deductible savings – As with IRAs, the money you sock away in your HSA is tax-deductible. You can contribute up to $3,400 as an individual, or $6,750 for family coverage in 2017. If you’re 55 or more, you can play catch-up with an added $1,000 contribution per year.

2. Tax-free withdrawals – As long as you use the money for “qualified medical expenses,” you’ll pay no tax on what you take out. These expenses include vision and dental, doctor visits, physical therapy, hearing aids and other medical devices, among many others. Check with the IRS for rules on what qualifies.

3. Tax-free growth – Leaving the money in your account, if you can afford to, and letting it grow over the years will give you a nice nest-egg by the time you retire. If you wait till age 65 to withdraw it, you can use the money on anything you like, just paying taxes on it like normal income. If you use it on qualified medical expenses, there’s no tax on withdrawals at all. Just don’t take it to go the movies before you turn 65—you’ll pay a hefty 20% penalty on non-medical expenses in addition to the taxes!

How to Get Started

Your employer may offer plans that are HSA-eligible. Some even offer matching contributions. Absent that, if you have a qualifying high-deductible health plan, you can set up an HSA at your banking institution.

The specter of catastrophic illness or injury looms large if your health insurance coverage is inadequate or your deductibles are out of sight. With judicious use of a Health Savings Account, you can shrink that menace down to size and plan for a healthier financial future.

Getting Started, Fear and All

How many times have you dreaded doing something only to finally get it done and say, “Well, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be”? Why is the first step always the hardest?

We talk ourselves into and out of things, build up obstacles that don’t exist, create imposing facades that stand between us and what we want. And all for what? Why do we do this? Because we're afraid.

Fear is a powerful motivator--or demotivator. Fear of failure; fear of the unknown; fear of looking foolish because we don’t know what the hell we’re doing.

But if it stops us from reaching our goals, where’s the benefit in letting fear control what we do? What possible advantage could there be in letting fear keep us from our dreams?

Perversely, the emotion that inhibits us is meant as a safeguard. Fear protects us from the unknown. The unknown feels threatening because it contains factors we cannot predict. But you know what? Life is unpredictable. It just is. You can’t manage everything.

When you have trouble getting started, ask yourself, “What am I afraid of? What’s the worst that could happen?” Take the argument out to its conclusion to see what it is you actually fear: “If I finish my novel and then try to get it published and no one wants it, I will have wasted X years of my life and will be depressed and feel like a failure.” Well, that’s pretty sad. Except it’s based on an assumption that isn’t true.

If you spent X years of your life doing something you wanted to do, like writing a novel that you always wanted to write, that time was not wasted. How is it more wasteful than doing other things you’ll be doing to pass the time? What if you spent that time playing pool or watching television? You wouldn’t tell yourself, “I cannot ever watch any TV (or play pool, or video games, or anything else amusing) because I will have wasted my life and then I’ll be a failure.” Sure, one could argue that time spent watching TV is wasted. But the point is that we all have things we like to do when we’re not actually engaged in earning a living. We don’t usually call ourselves a failure because we spent some time doing something we enjoy.

Another way to look at it: If you spent the same amount of time reading books as you would have spent writing that book, would you consider yourself a failure? Of course not. And if you write the book and your book doesn’t sell a single copy, you’ll still have something that you created, an accomplishment to be proud of, whether anyone else buys it or not.

Yes, not being published, if that’s what you want, would be disappointing. But being depressed and feeling like a failure would be a choice—one you can choose not to make. You can redefine your dream to make the act of creation the goal, and not what happens to your creation afterward. Then you have nothing to fear.

So, write the book already. And then write another one.

The Fraidy Cat

An essay I wrote a few years ago. 

The Fraidy Cat

            Out in the country, down by the lake, is no place for a fraidy cat. Yet here I find myself, surrounded by more creeping, crawling, flying, hopping, web-spinning creatures than ever slithered across the imagination of a Hollywood horror maven. 

            They’re everywhere: wasps at the window, ants in the pantry, beetles in the bathroom, gnats in the knickknacks. And nowhere, it seems, is unsuitable for spiders. They loaf in the lavatory, hunt in the hallway, clamber in the closet—you name it, they’ve been there.

            I was discussing the unbearableness of this situation with Kismet and Roswell, my feline daughters, and posed what I believed to be a perfectly reasonable solution. “You are predators,” I reminded them. “Go ye therefore and eat bugs.” They both gave me a look of scathing disdain (if you have a cat, you know the look) and proceeded to get on with the terribly important business of lounging about in a regal fashion.

            It’s not that they don’t hunt, of course. Kismet proudly brings me whatever rodent is in season. I thank her sweetly and return same to the Great Outdoors before too much harm results.  Roswell, on the other hand, prefers grasshoppers. She won’t eat them, naturally, just brings them inside to madly chase. I have tried to convey to her that my suggestion was meant to result in fewer bugs in the house, not more. She doesn’t care, being a cat.

            So, I had given up expecting my darlings to be of any use whatever in protecting me from the ongoing invasion of things-with-too-many-legs. I decided to let sleeping cats lie and Kismet was doing just that on her favorite pillow, my stomach. She opened her eyes when I scratched her head, blinked lazily at me, then fixed her gaze on a point high above, at ceiling level. I watched her big green eyes drift slowly down, down, down . . . when the sudden realization that there’s only one thing that wafts vertically downwards like that had me shoving her off and rolling aside just before the spider landed in bed.  It was brown and spindly-legged—the most dangerous kind. I dispatched it quickly, then grabbed Kismet up in a grateful hug. “You saved me from a brown recluse, Kizzie!”

            Her look (you know the one) seemed to say, “Of course, what else?” 

            Not to be outdone, Roswell, some weeks later, hopped up next to me on the bed for a nap—and continued hop-hop-hopping across the quilt in full predator mode, leading me to hop-hop-hop out of the way of a large and shaggy spider. When we were all through hopping (the spider, permanently) I exclaimed to my savior, “Rozzie, you do care!”

            To which she replied with a look (yes, that one) plainly saying, “Care about what?”
            Those two don’t fool me anymore. I know they’re my guardian angels. They just save their heroics for when it counts: when they feel like it.

Is Perfection Too Much to Ask?

Becoming a writer changes how you look at the written word. You instinctively pick apart your own and others’ writing, honing in on every little thing that could be improved. Some things are so basic they wave bright, red flags. Obvious spelling and punctuation errors make that shortlist. Other things take a little more experience to note, like clumsy transitions and awkward turns of phrase. We writers probably all have pet peeves that jump up and scream, “You have got to be kidding me!” whenever we see them.

My list of Writing Sins that Really Annoy Me ranges from the specific, such as making nouns plural by adding an apostrophe before the S, to the more nebulous: “Why can’t I seem to follow what this writer is saying without getting lost?” The former bothers me so much I’m tempted to not even insert an example, lest I hurt myself. Okay, for you, because I love writing and want to be helpful (deep breath, repeat after me: a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down …): potatoe’s. Ack! I may have to lie down now.

But the one mistake I’ve been seeing too much of lately is so glaring that it should shock anyone who thinks of writers as people who have a reasonable facility with their native language: improper use of the simple verb “to go.” Twice in one week I saw the same error in articles written by professional freelance writers—in an online magazine about writing. Both times, the author said “I had went” when she meant “I had gone.” Presumably, someone edits this magazine; presumably, this editor saw nothing wrong with saying “had went.” One could be snarky and point out that these articles were part of a series on freelancers having trouble getting paid by their clients, and the reason for nonpayment was not so much deadbeat clients as poor-quality writing. While I doubt that most clients would withhold payment solely based on a botched conjugation, the fact that it would even be a question strikes me as outrageous. Professional writers get paid to write well; bad writing should not be part of the portfolio.

Call me a grammar geek. Call me obsessive-compulsive. Heck, call me naïve. But I believe that professional writers have an obligation to write correctly. We don’t all like the same style of writing and not all writing will be to our taste. But a writer should at least be able to use basic grammar. If you’re a writer, you owe that to your clients—and your readers.

Need help? The Owl at Purdue Online Writing Lab is a great resource for writers of all genres. It has sections on grammar and punctuation with many helpful examples. Worth checking out, even if your writing, like Mary Poppins, is Practically Perfect in Every Way.