staying the path

I just accidently deleted a post I was working on all morning. Darnit!

I haven't blogged in a while because I was studying, had the second practice test, received my scores and then had a bout of self-doubt and depression. My score went up four points but, overall, it's still very low.

Last week, I was going to change my blog name to something that, at the time, I felt was more representative of my "reality" of low lsat scores, and therefore, bleak law school future. Something like "Dreams don't come true" or "I wish I were a butterfly."

It happened the day before the second practice test. I went to the bathroom during class break and talked with many of my women classmates. The four women I spoke to all had 150s on their first practice test. The lsat ranges with 120 as the lowest score and 180 as the highest score. You want a score in the early 170s or late 160s to go to a top school. My first practice test score was in the late 130s. You can't go to ANY law school with such a score. I felt so down when my classmates told me that they made the 150s on their very first practice test. That's when the self doubt started setting in.

I took the second practice test on Sunday and increased my score by four points but it's still a very low score. We have seven weeks to study before the actual test in June. But if I'm not ready, I will have to take the September test in order to get a higher score.

I was really down and feeling that my goals are futile. I have great intentions but they will not come true.

I went to volunteer at the community acupuncture clinic. I started a conversation with another volunteer. She asked about my lsat prep classes and I told her that I'm frustrated,

overwhelmed and that I feel that this is such an uphill battle. She told me to relax and to focus for a moment. She instructed me to talk about why I want to go to law school. I burst out talking about working with prisoners and my journey to gather effective tools to become a stronger community organizer. She stopped me after a couple of minutes and asked me questions that helped me to realize that I was so excited about talking about law school. She asked me to locate the part of my body that lights up when I talk about going to law school. I stopped and thought about this and realized that my chest was warm and was pulsating with energy. I think she pointed out that it was the fourth chakra. I pointed to my chest. She told me to say one word about the feeling in my chest at that moment. I said, "passionate."

She nodded her head and agreed, "Take that passion and let it guide you in your studies to do well on the test. Let it guide you when you're discouraged. Trust yourself." I thanked her for her healing and I thought to myself, "I'll remember my passion, my commitment, but right now, I still feel lousy." It is only now while writing this that I remember her words and appreciate them.

I was hanging out with Fui and Niko before going to class on Tuesday. We were hanging out at Shattuck and we passed the public library. There was a man who was lying on the ground near the library's tall glass windows. He was laughing loudly and boldly, then he stopped for a minute, then laughed hysterically again. I watched him for a couple of minutes. I thought of this man and I thought about my fears about law school and I started chuckling. Thank you brother for the laughter. This man illustrated a great tool for me, laugh at my seriousness. I still can see this man in my mind, and I remember to laugh at myself and everything around me.

Later that night, during my class break, I took a fifteen minute walk around Telegraph. As I became lost among the traffic of Cal students, street vendors and dread-locked white kids asking for spare change, I felt that I was in my element. I breathed in the evening air and saw myself as the ordinary woman I am, on an lsat prep class break. Wow! I'm finally taking the lsat prep class that I dreamed of taking when I first thought about going to law school!!! I am living in Berkeley, California among flowers!

Instead of bitching about all the barely twenty-year old undergrads in my lsat prep class, I thought, "Wow, I'm taking a class with kids who just turned twenty and I'm totally struggling with issues of age and I love the opportunity to have this struggle!" Wow, I'm finally here, struggling the good struggle! I dreamt of this since I was a high school student at Timpview High School in Provo, Utah. I didn't know what I really wanted when I was in high school but I was extremely passionate about engaging with the world. And I knew that that meant so many things that I didn't understand but I wanted to take it on.

And here it is man, in the palms of my hand. I have so many opportunities right now to meet new people and experience things that I couldn't even imagine.

I went back to my classroom and started conversations with the barely twenty-year old students that I like in my class. No wonder I like them, we all want to do social justice legal work when we become attorneys. Yay!! They also talked about how hard the weekend was for them. They experienced so much self-doubt and depression after taking the second practice test. I planned with one of my classmates to go drinking after class next week and talk about law schools.

As class reconvened after break, my lsat prep class started feeling different. I was no longer nervous and stressed out. I came to accept my role in the classroom as just another ordinary student who has a lot of anxieties about the test and is doing her best everyday. I felt so relieved that I no longer need to pressure myself into feeling like the "special" older student who has all the odds stacked up against her. I mean, the odds ARE real, they're not all imagined. And that's exactly what I'm relieved about! I now have the courage to look at the odds, face to face, and accept them and accept myself. Instead of running away because it's too hard and too painful. I am here to stay the course, which really, I have been doing all along throughout my life.

When I first spoke out loud about pursuing law school to myself, I was standing in the front gates of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. It was fall 2006. I was asking a Geography Phd student who lived in Worcester for four years about any lawyer connections she had in town. I told her that I was interested in interning at a law office to see if becoming an attorney was for me. This was the first semester of my International Development and Social Change grad. program.

The Phd student, Susan, contacted a past Phd student, Sarah, who was working at Legal Assistance Corporation of Central Massachusetts (LACCM). Sarah emailed me and invited me to visit her office. Sarah was incredibly kind to me and introduced me to her colleagues. However, I was bombarded with my first semester class load and student organizing in my department, and I couldn't spare time to volunteer at LACCM.

I had also focused my attention on a local member-run organization called EPOCA, Ex-prisoners and prisoners organizing for community advancement. Anyone can be a member of EPOCA and when you become a member, you can be mentored and trained to be a community organizer. I chose to be a community organizer. Although I had been an organizer and an activist since I was a high school student, I really didn't know the ins and outs of community organizing until I worked with EPOCA's director Steve and members like Emma, Becky, Jenna, Terry, Anthony, Sarah, Delia, Carlos, and so many other folks. In working with formerly incarcerated women and men, I learned to take myself seriously as a leader and to accept the gifts I have been given from the ancestors to work honestly and kindly with people.

I was scared as hell when I first joined EPOCA. I mean fcking scared as hell. I was scared because I met very attractive people who were radically political, very loving, full of enthusiasm, carrying a lot of pain in their bodies, who were vulnerable with each other. I saw my own reflection in them and that unsettled me.

I forced myself to attend their meetings. They were my teachers, they helped me to understand my path. I intuitively knew that my freedom was directly connected to the freedom of the members I was working side by side with.

Now I can name what I was afraid of and I continue to be afraid of. It is the great shame that I carry from experiences where my freedom was taken away by the systems that promised to protect me, like the state/the church/the family.

When I meet incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people, we talk to each other from and out of the shame we hold in our bodies. When I converse with people who have been incarcerated, we are both so well versed in the pain of life, that we cut the bull shit of small talk and get to what needs to be said. We are comfortable together in silence. Every conversation, every moment together, is working out the shame that our fragile, good lil' bodies carry.

In working with EPOCA we lobbied senators and legislators to change criminal offender record information laws and to change practices by employers and landlords that discriminate against people with convictions. We organized and coordinated direct actions, meetings, workshops, university and community events. We worked with the local city workforce program to implement employment training for formerly incarcerated people. We lobbied employers to pledge to hire formerly incarcerated applicants. In 2007, I had the great opportunity to attend the 1st U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia with four other EPOCA women. My great sisters: Emma, an African American woman from Roxbury; Jenna, a white woman from Central Mass.; Becky, a Boricua woman from Worcester, and Iye, an Indonesian woman from Sumatra. This experience strengthened our sisterhood and led us all to make a commitment to be close supporters of each other for the rest of our lives. This experience also led to the early stages of creating a women's group for EPOCA women.

My work with EPOCA provided me with opportunities to work with other organizations in Massachusetts and nationwide, like Critical Resistance, a national organization that is committed to ending the prison industrial complex (PIC), based in Oakland, California. EPOCA is also housed in an artist/activist collective home called Stone Soup. The committed people at Stone Soup supported me in countless ways in being an organizer. Craig and Jocelyn, who were the caretakers of Stone Soup in 2007, took Niko in with their own boys, Ben and Johnny, while I tended to my work load. I couldn't have made it through school or work full-time without the individuals and families at Stone Soup who made sure Niko was safe, fed him, helped him to put together his first bicycle, taught him to ride a bike, helped him to improve his reading skills, encouraged him to take a main role in a play, shared their lives with his. My survival in Worcester as a student and a single parent was contingent on the community of people around me. We didn't have any family around us or a Pacific Island community so we became engaged with our neighborhood of Main South and became part of other families.

It was incredible work that we did together in EPOCA!

By the end of my first year in my 2-year graduate program, I decided that I wanted to become an attorney. I asked anyone I knew about local attorneys who do social justice work. I interned for Worcester's most popular immigrant lawyer for two months. Randy was a very kind man who always invited me to sit in on his interviews with his clients. At this time, very similar to right now, I had absolutely no clue about what happens in a law firm.

I then called Sarah back at LACCM to secure an internship for the next school year and she told me to apply for an Americorps legal internship at their office because it offered a small stipend. The money was important to me because I needed a wage to supplement my school money. I did not receive child support and money was tight after the rent was paid.

I applied for the Americorps legal internship and got it. It was tough to work the 40 hour/week load because I was working on my master's paper, classes, student organizing and looking out for Niko, who was struggling with school at the time. The scant Americorps wage made us feel rich! We bought a used car off another student, which I needed for work, and still had a couple dollars left over for Niko's pepperoni pizza.

I had no clue about law offices and legal assistance when I went to work at LACCM. This internship provided me with access to the legal world in which I had no access to before.

Like the formerly incarcerated people I worked together with in EPOCA, the only thing I knew intimately about the law was from being on the other side of it. My father going to jail in Tonga, my brother being convicted to prison in Utah, the dogs that I loved dearly were ordered to be killed by the courts because they bit a person, the countless times that my family, friends and I were racially profiled by the police at gun point, thrown against walls and side walks and being jailed on bogus charges. Being arrested and dragged to buses in the Nevada desert for protesting nuclear testing on native lands. Going to the SLC jail, that use to be at the basement of the new library, for being part of a peaceful protest in support of the Zapatista uprising in 1994.

When I was 17 years old, I accused a white police officer of racially profiling my family and being disrespectful to my dad. I defended myself because I didn't have a lawyer. I realized quickly, as I was standing in front of the entire court, that it's not against the law for a white man of authority to treat my father like an idiot child. I felt so powerless that I couldn't speak so I wept. I took in a lot of shame from that experience. I later called the courts to ask about what happened with the case and the officer's attorney answered the phone. This conservative white attorney asked me on the phone, "What were you thinking when you accused Officer __ of being a racist? That wasn't true." I explained and gave him examples of how the officer racially profiled me and my family. Surprisingly, the attorney listened to what I had to say, because, he was shocked that I spoke in English and that I had an articulate opinion.

These are the kinds of experiences I had with the law before I worked the AmeriCorps legal internship.

In my internship, we were required to write monthly reports about what we did on the job.

Here's a small part of a report I turned in. This explains the transition I felt from feeling powerless under the law when I was younger to feeling empowered when I had access to institutional power as a legal advocate with LACCM:

My new healthier relationship with the legal system resonated with me when I went...to the new Worcester Court House. (The attorneys I accompanied) were representing a group of low-income families and individuals who are trying to hold on to their current housing. It was the first time I set foot in a court house as a legal advocate for others.

We passed the check-in lines and were about to ascend the staircase. I looked around me at the ethereal colors and architecture and the many people standing and sitting, awaiting for their trials to begin. I stood for a moment and felt very humble and very grateful for the opportunity I have to be an AmeriCorps intern at LACCM. I felt so happy that I have made it to this point in my life where I don't have to constantly fear and fight against the legal system. I felt so happy and relieved that I now see the legal system as a construct that I can take part in building, reconfiguring and disassembling. I am very grateful that I am a part of this amazing learning opportunity that fuels me to continue my life's journey to be a skilled and strong advocate for myself and for the lives of others.

My Americorps legal internship was only for one year. It was a valuable experience and a great blessing to have worked among attorneys, paralegals, volunteers and to go to court everyday as a legal advocate.

Now my journey brings me to Berkeley to an lsat prep class. It's now time to sleep.