Top sheet

Good posture, compromise, law school

This week’s top sheet interviewee is quite important because, well, you’ll see. I don’t want to give too much away yet!

She does use a top sheet, due to not liking the feeling of the comforter on her face. She pulls the sheet up to her chin, so the comforter on the face wouldn’t be ideal. The top sheet is also the way it has always been, and there is no reason to stray from your ways when they work! She also likes the weight of the sheet and comforter plus the blanket. Then, she washes the sheets (actually her husband washes the sheets). She recommends marrying someone who does laundry. She is currently thinking of the word laundry.

She talks about how great exercise has been for her, and how good it makes her feel. She has started doing hot yoga (but the medium hot kind, not the fully hot kind), and feels like it centers her. There is still a lot going on in her mind, even while doing yoga, but it still makes her feel good. It is hard, but the feeling of accomplishing something makes it worth it. 

Lately, she has been passionate about supporting younger people with mental health issues, and has been talking to her friends who have teen/young-adult children. The reason for the mental health discussions, she says, are two-fold. Part of it is just awareness among this generation. She says that if someone were going to therapy while she was growing up, everyone would say they were crazy. More openness means more awareness. She knows we are hearing about mental health more, but there is still a mental health crisis. She has been listening to Lisa Damour, who is an expert on teens and talks about the causes of the mental health crisis, such as social media/technology and the pandemic. The interviewee also speaks on the major effects mental health has within her work, which she is passionate about, including domestic violence. There is interesting psychology that goes along with all of this, which many people do not understand. 

She is a family law attorney, and loves it because she loves helping people. Seeing someone in one of the hardest parts of their lives and watching them grow and become confident, in such a better place than they were in before. They start out thinking it is the worst thing that will ever happen to them, but often come out knowing they are capable of standing on their own two feet. She also helps children through helping their parents, even if they aren’t sure that’s what she is doing. If the parents can be decent, the kids will ultimately be okay. Two happy homes is better than one unhappy one, she says, and educating people on divorce is important. She speaks on her own parents’ divorce, and how hard it was for her. “Kids want their parents back together, no matter how toxic it is. It’s all you know, it’s the environment you live in. Of course, it was really toxic, but there were still really good moments and it’s normal to hold on to these.”

She speaks about the influence her upbringing had on who she is today. She always had a passion for advocacy growing up. She was the shyest kid in the family (out of her five siblings), and would try to resolve conflict early on, at the dinner table. “I used to wear a pin to school that said ‘I heart being right’.  Bad, I know. It was shaped like a heart, too. I guess I was always a little lawyer. A shy little lawyer.” As far as her parenting, she is influenced by how permissive her parents were. There were five kids, which was a chaotic situation. She wanted to be more involved and present, especially compared to her dad, who was rarely around. She wanted to really get to know her kid. Growing up, she and her siblings would get up on a summer morning, leave the house, and come back after the sun went down. It was just a different environment, and she wanted to make sure to never forget to be a constant presence. She also is conscious about being involved in education, as nobody in her family ever talked about the downsides to drugs or alcohol. She wanted to talk about it with her child from early on, especially acknowledging a deep history of addiction in the family. Bringing up other topics her generation avoided, like sex, sexuality, and gender identity was also important to her. 

Her upbringing also made her more rigid, as a free-flowing and chaotic childhood overwhelmed her, so she’s noticed herself being more straight-laced after leaving home.  Also, she describes the way she copes with trauma and hard things as picturing a million little doors in her brain, and everything gets closed inside of them. This is good and bad, she says, because it can be hard to dig those things back up. She says this is good for her work, though, because she knows people who have not been able to stop thinking about work at home and therefore could not continue working in family law. She says all she can do is try to get clients out of a situation as whole as they can be, which involves a lot of pseudotherapy, since she is not a therapist but ends up giving a lot of therapy-based advice, always encouraging people to have therapeutic support. “Therapy by fire!”

I asked her about the key to being with the same person for 35 years, to which she said that marriage, or any relationship, is made up of a series of small relationships that potentially lead to one long relationship. We’re all changing and growing all the time, she says. “The person I married is definitely not the guy right over here, and I’m not the person he married either. We’ve been through 5, 10 different relationships together and choose to continue working really hard to make it work.” She says that being married and having a kid are the hardest things she has ever done, while very worth it. The view that it will always be easy is detrimental. Everything won’t be easy just because you’re in love- it will take work and compromise. You both have to live your own lives, not give yourself up completely. “Have your own experiences, be okay with your person going off and doing their own thing and you going off and doing your thing, so that you can be two individual people also who then come together and enjoy each other’s company and share things.” She talks about communication being essential, as well as knowing it is okay to not get along all the time, in fact, there’s nothing wrong with that. We all have conflict, it’s the way life is, and you can’t expect to always agree with one person. Make sure you both are willing to work to make it good, she says.

When asked what made all of this effort worth it, she answered “love”. You have love, companionship, someone you enjoy spending your life with, it’s fun, she says. She talks about having a lot she enjoys doing with her husband, and having a lot of similar interests. “It’s nice to have simple things and routine be enjoyable, like having dinner, watching a show, going to bed and reading- for me, there’s so much comfort in routine. I like some surprises, but not a lot.” To this, I respond “me too.”

When I asked if she had any regrets, she answered that she regrets not traveling internationally while in college, or right out of college. She does not regret going to law school, or waiting for a while to go to law school after graduating college. She says she is not big on regrets, and tries not to live in that space knowing it doesn’t serve her. She goes on to a few other regrets. “I regret that I didn’t have a boob reduction earlier in life! But I’m going to.” A few months later, I can confirm that she is! Yay for following your dreams! She also regrets not fixing her posture and recommends that all the young people reading start fixing theirs. I sat up straight right when I started writing about this. Shoulders back and down! She also regrets not wearing her retainer when she was younger because then she had to pay for her second pair of braces… this started to feel personal so I moved on to the next question. 

She expresses being glad she went to college, especially not knowing where that came from or where she got the idea, as the first one in her family to go. Though she was shy and didn’t want to be away from her family, she decided to go, and is so glad she was able to leave her hometown. She is also glad she went to law school. She’s glad she had a child, especially since she and her husband went back and forth about it for a while and ultimately ended up deciding to. Thank goodness for that one. “I’m glad I married your dad, I’m glad we’re still together, I’m glad we’ve been able to push through all the shit we’ve been through. I have a really good, happy life with balance. Great friends, travel, a good home. It’s pretty great.”

Her advice for her nineteen year old self is to be more open-minded, as she has a natural inclination to stay on the same path, but wants her younger self to be more open to humans, to travel, to all kinds of things so if “you see something that sparks your interests, it’s okay to change paths. I wish I’d been less rigid and more open and flexible, and I’m still working on being less rigid. I’d give my nineteen year old self that advice and my 55 year old self.”

Time for a message to the youngins! She wants you to take care of yourself, and do the things you need to for yourself like moving your body and keeping your brain healthy. Start those things early and make it a habit. Move every day, she says, as it’s good for your mental well being and soul. Another message would be that it all pretty much works out. If you think it might go bad, it could also go great. Thinking about the bad and worrying interrupts the little joys of life. Live your life, have safe sex, be careful with drugs, don’t take pills from strangers, no cocaine, no fentanyl!

Word: goat

As always, thank you very much for reading top sheet and I hope you enjoyed. I’m on a roll with these but I only have one more interview ready so it’s about time to start talking to new people…and I’m quite excited about it. Stay tuned! You probably won’t see me for a bit because it is the busiest season of the year (finals) so I hope your holiday seasons are going swimmingly! Eagerly awaiting our next chat

Love,