So I’m an incoming senior in college. I get it that there’s this “oh you’re gonna be poor for a bit in college” stage, but I am barely passing by. I worked my a## off throughout high school in customer service to save up my money, but my parents are financially abusive (amongst other sh#tty things) so I saw little to none of that money by the time I turned 18. Granted, looking back I still wouldn’t be much better off even if I still had that cash.
I’ve been studying to go to law school and everything is just so hopeless. Because of my parents’ financial abuse, I’ve tried so hard to be financially independent as I can be. Every time they’ve given me cash, they treat it as a debt over my head as a way to control my life (I know a lot of parents give their kids “loans” for them to pay off, but this isn’t that. “You have to do XYZ because we gave you this cash this one time!”) I barely make enough on my own for basic expenses, and even with taking out student loans I still need their financial help.
This summer, I’ve been working at two different law firms for 48 hours a week- one near my school and one 5+ hours away, because my parents said “if you don’t come home this summer, don’t expect us to help you out with money!” Without them contributing, I couldn’t afford rent and would have to live with them full time in that abusive household, so I agreed to a week at school and a week at home arrangement. I’m exhausted from making that drive every weekend, and I’ve barely been able to do anything fun on the weekends because of it.
All of that aside, these law firms have shown me just how broken things are. Despite legitimately doing all of the things an attorney or paralegal do (creating legal documents) correctly and much faster than my coworkers without any law school experience, I’m paid a minuscule fraction of what the others are paid. Because of how these firms track how much to charge people hourly for work we do, I know that my work alone made one firm in particular $5k in profits in a single afternoon. How much of that did I see? For the time I spent doing it, $20 after taxes. All because I don’t have a degree yet. My boomer coworkers, who don’t even know how to copy/paste and ctrl-f on a Word document, see nearly five times as much of the pay for the work that I’m doing.
And so I decided, why work so hard if I’m gonna be paid as abysmally as that? Well, both places reprimanded me when I did so for “being lazy” because “that sh#t won’t fly in most law offices,” even though I was being just as productive as my coworkers. I got threatened to be fired in one place because I called off sick for throwing up since 3am, and the other for missing an hour of work to go to a doctors appointment to get my prescription anxiety and depression medication. On top of that, they’re always breathing down my neck and micromanaging me despite me making practically zero errors during my time at both places. One location in particular, my boss has so little respect for me and openly insults me in front of the other coworkers and always finds a reason to b*tch at me for the most minuscule and unimportant sh#t.
Why deal with all of this and just go work customer service you may ask? Well, because my LSAT score isn’t as high as the law schools I’m looking at want it to be, despite my 3.85 GPA / Honors Class and the test itself having literally nothing to do with law, nobody will accept me as of now. Despite the thousands of dollars and hard work I’ve put into my education, it appears that the only way I can get into the career that I already know I’m talented in my only hope of getting into law school is to show them that I’ve worked for two law firms already. So, I pretty much have no choice but to put up with this bullsh#t.
I’m so tired. I don’t see any of the money for the work that I’m doing so I’m barely scraping by, forcing me to rely on my abusive family for financial help. I’m so tired from constantly driving, and I haven’t had the time or energy to do anything fun this entire summer. The rare times that I spend time with my friends and roommates in my run-down apartment in a shady spot in town, we can barely even afford to get drunk off of cheap beer. I see my girlfriend so little because the two of us are always working so that we can afford to live.
The worst part about all of this? I have little hope for the future. My girlfriend and want to get married and start a family one day, but even if I can get into law school we’d still be living paycheck to paycheck or with our parents until I graduate and ~
maybe find an okay paying legal job in 4-5 years. Neither of us will even have enough to have a decent place to live, let alone buy wedding rings or start a family. Not that we’re even confident that bringing kids into the world is a good idea based on how things have been going in the news lately, despite how much we’d want to.
I’m not suicidal or anything like that, but what’s the point? There is practically zero hope that I will be able to accomplish anything that I truly want in life for like the next decade, and even then there’s no guarantee that even then I’ll have the cash to do that. Everything is so incredibly broken and I just keep on losing the energy to keep it up.
F#ck this system so much, and f#ck every single billionaire, oligarch, and politician making everyone’s lives a living hell.
TL;DR I can barely afford to live studying to become an attorney because of my financially abusive parents and two law offices that take advantage of me for cheap labor. I’m struggling to get into law school despite academic success. I’m so tired and have no hope for the future.
Edit: Spelling/Formatting