The law revolutionizes the way I see the world. More than learning the law itself, I’m learning to think like a lawyer, the principles of critical and analytical thinking—how to pick apart arguments, base them in facts, and spin facts to suit a theory. It all helps me to understand what leaders, groups, and societies do to build an ideology and defend a point of view.
I turn thirty in law school, but most people don’t know. I feel, act, and look like I’m in my early twenties, like most of my peers. And just like in college, I never mention the Family. The strange thing is, the more I pretend to belong, the more I feel like I might actually belong. My classmates and I are experiencing all these new things together for the first time, and in some areas I’m far more mature, in others more innocent. We all stress over our grades, debate the ethics of judicial decisions, and compete for summer law firm internships. Although Berkeley Law School has even lower acceptance rates than Harvard Law, we don’t have the cutthroat competitiveness of the East Coast schools. We form study pods, share notes, and go for beers after finals. I don’t have the traditional school backpack mentality or shoulder strength, so I start a new trend of using wheely bags for heavy law textbooks. Everyone laughs at me the first semester, but by the next semester it’s caught on.
I dig into classes on the development of the legal system in China, and I organize the first law school delegation to the National People’s Congress. But my favorite activity is during my last semester of law school, which I spend as a Hansard Fellow and intern at the British Parliament in London, writing a paper comparing the political systems of China, the United Kingdom, and the United States through the lens of their supreme courts and rule of law. It’s fascinating to see how the position of the high court among the branches of government affects the entire political ethos.
The time passes in a beautiful blur, exceptional in its normality. I can make enough money as a law firm intern in the summers to live on during the school year if I’m very careful, so I don’t have the added burden of work with a full class load. My body, always strung so tight, can relax just the tiniest bit. Georgetown may have sharpened my mind, but Berkeley rounds me out as a person.
After I graduate, I start my first professional job as a lawyer at Skadden, Arps in Los Angeles, one of the top international law firms. When my first paycheck arrives, I see just how far I’ve come from canning in parking lots. The starting salary of $175,000 is more money than my dad made in ten years.
I’m earning good money, and though the work is intense and stressful, the freedom of not scrimping, of being able to afford my own apartment, a decent car, and non–thrift store clothes is exhilarating. It gives me a new sense of independence and value—and an ability to stand up for myself. I’m doing international mergers-and-acquisitions (M&A) worth billions of dollars, including the sale of Skype in 2009, valued at $2.75 billion.
After a couple of years in the Los Angeles office, I’m sent to Hong Kong, where my knowledge of the Chinese language and culture can be put to good use. But despite enjoying a great salary and first-class flights and fine dining, something is missing. I want to do work that’s meaningful, to build something of my own, not just push papers for multinational companies.
At the end of 2012, I move from Skadden, Arps Hong Kong to a smaller California firm, where I head their corporate law practice, and then, in 2018, I open my own corporate law practice as outside general counsel for select clients.
I love solving problems and helping my clients achieve their goals, but I also have a nagging feeling that I haven’t yet achieved my own goal. There’s something bigger that I still need to do, but the answers are buried deep in my mind, under layers of dust, blocked off with caution tape.
When I left Skadden, I begin my personal quest in earnest. I voraciously read self-help books and attended seminars—to understand, to heal, to separate the truth from the lies in what I was taught in the Family and in the world around me.
I read Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, and immediately recognized myself and many people I knew by the characteristics we develop as coping mechanisms from abuse. But mostly, her insights help me understand what can happen with parents who physically beat, or even sexually abuse, their children. The book describes how people who think of themselves as “good” can dole out violent spankings or other forms of child abuse without empathy. According to Miller, when some people experience abuse as children, they cut off their own self-empathy, so they cannot feel empathy for the person they are abusing in return.
Imagine being in the body of a small baby smacked for the first time—the fear, shock, horror, anger, and violation of her whole being. In a baby, all those negative emotions must be sublimated and cut off because that child must love the perpetrator of violence in order to stay alive. That person is their sole source of survival. The only hope is to break the cycle through reconnection to that small inner child as an adult.
Gasping, I realize that despite my outward success, I’m still using the same coping mechanism I used as a child. I’m still sublimating and cutting off my emotions—but it’s no longer because I need my abuser. My survival instinct has driven me to snuff out my feelings, to be dependent on no one, to be invulnerable.
I feel the walls I’ve constructed around myself begin to shake, as if someone’s removed a small but foundational block from beneath my feet. Since leaving the Family, I’ve seen vulnerability as a weakness. Hadn’t my life experiences demonstrated over and over that whenever I’m vulnerable, I end up abused and raped? When I yield and let down my barriers, hasn’t someone always used it to manipulate and hurt me? To protect myself, I’ve built a fortress. I’ve become financially and emotionally independent. I’ve thrown up shields of positivity and logic. I’ve looked forward, not back.
But has this helped? I’ve continued to be pressured into things I don’t want, including sex. I either keep men out or let them walk all over me. Longing for connection and then reacting to feeling taken advantage of, I close off my heart until I can be more callous than the person I’m with. Vulnerability no longer feels like a choice, but an inability.
Realization slices through me. How can I have the love I desire with all my being if I cannot be vulnerable, if I cannot let people in and give them the power to hurt me again?
I must deal with my wounds.
I have three tools to start with. One is knowing that no one is coming to help. No matter what anyone has done to me in the past, I am the only one who can do anything about it now. I alone am responsible for my happiness and success and healing.