Conversations With Cady

Anxiety sucks. I can’t remember when I started to feel anxious. I don’t really remember dealing with it until after law school. After I graduated, I had big goals and I thought that I could only accomplish them by perfecting the craft. I put a lot of pressure on myself to perform. My best was never good enough. Only perfect was acceptable. This pressure may have led to the uneasy nervousness I now associate with anxiety.  Anxiety manifests in many ways for me. Early on, it caused me to lose sleep. My brain raced for hours on all the things I had to accomplish the next day or all the ways I could have done something better that day. I ruminated on the emails I sent, the demand letters I drafted, and the meetings I had with clients and my superiors. It was all consuming at night and I constantly feared I could have done something better. At night time, I lost control of my thoughts and regularly spiraled into the negative and worst-case scenarios. A few years into my practice, I star...

Early this year I found myself crying after a hearing that was continued to a later date. I had prepared for weeks. I researched, wrote an outline of my argument, identified the questions I wanted to ask the witnesses, and was overly prepared to appear before the judge. It went fine but we didn’t finish. We were required to reschedule the remainder of the hearing nearly two months later. I was deflated. I had put so much time and energy into prepping for this hearing only to have no resolution. The end was delayed. All I could see was the many more hours I would now have to put in to prepare for the continued hearing. The many more days and nights this matter would be floating around in my head. It felt like I could not focus on anything else or rest until it was over.  That, my friends, is burnout. It is working too much, expending endless energy on certain issues, personal matters, clients, or cases that you literally cannot function. You begin to distort your own reality. You sa...

At this moment, I am a woman learning about who I am and what I want from my life. I am a ten-year practicing lawyer. I am a student. I am a friend, girlfriend, daughter, sister, and aunt. I am curious. I am an athlete and also, a coach. I am anxious. I am Type A. I am a traveler, reader, bubble bather, sunset watcher, and writer. I am an empath. Sometimes, I am happy and sometimes, I am sad. I am growing.  It is hard to say how I got to this point. How, at 34, I started questioning my "life plan". Through a pandemic and a lot of isolation, we have all been provided time, perhaps too much time, to think about our past, our present, and our future selves. I've considered what brings me the most joy. Here is what I know -  you do not have to do something just because you are good at it. You do not have to do something because you have the education, experience, and resources to do it. You also do not have to do something because it is expected from you.  The truth is that t...