Field of F*cks Be Barren
One day in court recently a group of attorneys had gathered around waiting, as usual, for our case to be called. While we were waiting, we all started talking about when the unnecessary bullshit of our jobs rears their ugly heads. We all then began talking a little about the current shit storms we were dealing with in our profession. All of a sudden, one of the people in the group said “You know, there comes a time when my field of fucks becomes barren, and I just can’t give a shit anymore. I just can’t.” I couldn’t write their words down fast enough so when I saw this attorney again, I asked them for that quote again…my field of fucks is barren. What an apt, relevant, and appropriate metaphor for us attorneys.
I have come to realize that there has to be a finite number of fucks in all our fields for which we have the capacity to harvest. We can only gather so much in any one season otherwise we lose the ability to harvest at all. It got me thinking about how much we have the capacity to care and give a shit when the shit storm stirs up so much garbage that we can only process so much of it. But, I feel that our profession demands that we always have a field full of fucks to harvest; full of fucks to give. We are supposed to always just take all the bullshit and tomfoolery that occurs as a part of practicing in our profession and say nothing of it. Just shut up and lawyer, right? Not for me. At some point, our fields of fucks lay barren and there are no more fucks to harvest or give. This has to be fine. This has to be acceptable. And this has to be okay if we are to continue to stay in this profession in any type of adaptive and positive way. But we have to balance this with being invested and effective advocates. We are SUPPOSED to give a fuck all the time…right? I mean, how many of us have heard a client or someone else say to them “You don’t care about….” Or “You aren’t working for ….” We are constantly being accused of running out of fucks way in advance of when we actually run out of fucks; which is incredibly frustrating.
But our fields of fucks can lay barren and at the same time we can still be effective advocates. How? Because we have many fields in which to harvest from, not all are sowed with fucks. We have fields of empathy; fields of dedication, fields of hard work; fields of positivity and fields of hope that grow in addition to our fields of fucks, and those fields are not barren. The types of things in our fields of fucks are the following: 1) clients making horrible decisions despite your relentless urging and advice, we run out of giving a fuck for this, 2) judges refusing to follow the law, no matter how much EVERYONE, including opposing counsel (sometimes including the bailiffs) begs the court to the contrary, we run out of giving a fuck for this, 3) client’s telling you that you should feel lucky that they are willing to work with a black lawyer….I run out of a giving a fuck for this one. These are the fucks that have to lay fallow at some point.
I was negotiating a child custody modification case one time and I started to extoll to the opposing counsel about how supposedly the child’s life would be altered in a bad way should some current term change, and how we wanted to try and avoid that. In response this attorney smiled at me and said “Oh my dear, I don’t care about this case in that way. All I am asking is if your client will accept my client’s proposed terms.” This attorney did not give one iota of a fuck about the actual meat of the case. They didn’t care about the best interest of this child; they cared only about whether or not we could avoid a trial and reach an agreement, or not, regardless of what the agreement was. I remember not getting offended, but being totally riveted by this. This attorney’s field of fucks was barren and they quickly zoned in on what they had to do. They just wanted to do it. It’s like they cared, but they didn’t.
We care, but then we don’t. We have to have this boundary line or we will inevitably suffer from all the things we fear. We don’t have infinite numbers of fucks to give and we cannot keep a field of fucks fertile and growing all the time. We are going to have to let some things go and what this metaphor, I have beaten to death, tells us is, that that fact is inevitable.
We can absolutely be stellar devoted attorneys that subscribe to this mantra and still be effective and damn good attorneys. We can still hold our ethical charges and still hold fast to this way of approaching our work. We can still do this because part of our duty and obligation is to cull through a lot of the fucks and bullshit that gets sent our way. We have been educated and trained to channel and separate what is important and what we MUST give a fuck about versus those things we must not and toss to the waste side (issue spotting…remember?) We have to be able to say “I don’t give a fuck about this….but I give a fuck about this. Let’s talk about THIS.” It’s not that we don’t give a fuck about you or your case. We are hyper focused on solving your legal problem and to do that, we can’t give a fuck about every little thing. Don’t get me wrong, we need to KNOW about every little thing in order to determine if it is legally significant, but if we then don’t give a fuck about it, just understand that that particular tid-bit found its way into our barren field of fucks.
So yes, our field of fucks CAN be barren, and also…we can still be damn fine attorneys, nonetheless.
*Photo Credit: 5370240 © David Plazas | Dreamstime.com
Well, this is just too damn real for us in attorney land—-I’m finding myself here often in many of my cases——I can go on and on and you can blog this quote and unpack it some more. There’s layers to this shit.