The beginning…

I was never really cut out to be a lawyer, well not the type I ended up becoming. I trained at a large firm of solicitors in the City of London and from day one always felt like a misfit. But how did I get there and stick it for as long as I did? The answer’s really quite simple if you know where to look. No-one forced me to do it after all. It was my choice. But my background and upbringing had a lot to do with it.

I grew up in Doncaster. A very average upbringing in a very average town. My big problem was not having a Yorkshire accent and being a bit shy and effeminate at a state school where it didn’t pay to be different. Which meant I was a posh, stuck-up poof as far as a lot of the other kids were concerned (one even taunted me by calling me a lesbian – try working that one out). You can guess the rest. Kids really can be evil.

Basically I needed to leave Doncaster. A job in London was the obvious choice, especially as I had aunts, uncles and cousins living there (hence the lack of a Yorkshire accent – would you rather sound like people you love or people who make your life hell?). As for what that job should be, I needed something fairly well paid that would play to the family expectation that I would get a profession. Given that I was too squeamish to be a doctor, dentist or vet, I hit upon the idea of becoming a lawyer. As for university, I ended up in Brighton. Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester were way too close to home, and Brighton is about as far away from Doncaster as you can go without getting your feet wet (that is, if you want to study English law), plus my granny and grandpa lived in Eastbourne. Much as I liked the idea of studying in Scotland, I didn’t want to qualify there, and I was told not to waste my time applying to Oxbridge.

My approach was very practical and focused, and it served me well. Unfortunately, however, in my haste to escape, I failed to think about what I actually wanted to do. It’s a dilemma I’ve struggled with ever since.

So I ended up in London. I wasn’t kept on at the end of my training contract as I qualified in the middle of the recession of the early 1990s when the period of rapid expansion that law firms had experienced in the 1980s was replaced by a period of severe cutbacks and redundancies. After a couple of years working in-house and then teaching, I decided to go back into private practice. The trauma of not being kept on stayed with me for quite a long time and I felt there was unfinished business between me and the City. I wanted to prove to myself that I had what it took to practise as a City lawyer. At first things went fairly well. There were enough times when work was fun to make up for the times when it wasn’t, and I had a feeling that however unpleasant things got, this was a stepping stone to better things. The trouble was I didn’t know what those better things were and I fell into the trap of letting other people persuade me that what they wanted was what I wanted. Nevertheless, I was young and had my career ahead of me. I just had to work hard and everything would fall into place.

Gradually, however, the unpleasant days started to outnumber the good ones and I reached a point when I was unable to remember when I had last enjoyed my job. I used to feel euphoric when I finished work on Friday night with the weekend ahead of me, but then wake up on Saturday morning with a sense of dread, counting down the hours until Monday morning when I would have to be back in work. If I did manage to leave work early enough to meet friends during the week, I would always be the last to arrive, often stressed and always flustered. I remember once bursting out crying at my desk during a particularly unpleasant deal as I realised I would need to work late and cancel dinner with friends – again. My secretary walked in, took one look at me, handed me a tissue, turned the lights off, closed the office door and left me to it. I got to the stage when I stopped bothering to arrange anything socially during the week because the effort of trying to leave the office on time and continually failing to do so was itself too stressful. Once, when I went out to get a sandwich for lunch, I remember waiting at a pedestrian crossing for a lorry to go past and wondering if there was a way of getting run over badly enough to have a few weeks of peace and quiet in hospital, but not badly enough for there to be any lasting damage. I wasn’t suicidal, but something was seriously wrong. I felt as though I had been given a life sentence, but couldn’t work out what I’d done to deserve it. I also had an overwhelming sense that my life hadn’t yet really started and that I was treading water in the meantime while I worked out what to do. The trouble was I didn’t know what to do, basically because I didn’t know what I wanted. All I knew was what I didn’t want, and I didn’t feel sufficiently in control of my life to do anything about it. I felt as though I was existing rather than living, watching from the side as others moved cheerfully towards their goals. I changed jobs and stopped being a fee-earner (this is the term used in law firms to describe the lawyers who do chargeable work for clients, as distinct from everyone else, and in my case the lawyers who trade the opportunity to become a partner in favour of a better work-life balance). I moved to another law firm. Each time there would be a sense of relief and a period of enjoyment, but sooner or later it would be replaced by a sense that I was back on a treadmill going nowhere. As I hit my forties, I started to get a sense that doors were closing and that time was running out. My professional life was coming to an end before it had started and I had very little to show for it beyond a fairly affluent lifestyle and a sense of emptiness inside. I realised that being a good boy, working hard and doing as I was told weren’t the answer.

The final piece of the jigsaw puzzle fell into place when I realised that my actions to date had largely been driven by fear: fear of failure, fear of disapproval and fear of the unknown. I had spent the best part of twenty years dodging the real issue: that nothing would change until I stopped behaving like a scared five year old boy hiding in the body of a man in his forties. I’d like to say that I grasped the nettle and made a positive jump into the unknown. The reality, however, is that I hit rock bottom and realised that if I valued my sanity, I didn’t have a choice but to resign and do something completely different.

So that was the start of my journey. I spent a few months floundering about and more than a few sleepless nights wondering if I had made the biggest mistake of my life. Looking back, however, I can honestly say it was the best thing I have done.