<p>I regret graduating from college in three years instead of four. I really wish I had spent the extra year there with all my friends, taking more courses that interested me, instead of rushing to law school where, at age 20, I was approximately 5 years younger than the average age of my classmates. Law school was difficult enough an adjustment, and I was painfully shy enough, without that added disadvantage. </p>
<p>I regret entering law school that year in the first place, in late August 1975, when my mother had just died at the end of June from that car accident. I had no idea how traumatized I really was; I got by my first term with mostly A’s on habit and adrenaline (plus I started smoking that fall, something it took me 15 years to stop), and the depression and apathy didn’t really set in consciously until later that year. I wish I had taken some time off before starting, to have a chance to deal with the situation instead of being thrown into the maelstrom of Harvard Law School – quite a different atmosphere (basically, sink or swim with nobody, seemingly, caring about the students as people) from what I was used to at what we used to call “Mother Yale,” with good reason.</p>
<p>Finally, what I really wish is that I had never gone to law school in the first place. I’m way too old now, and have way too many financial obligations, to do anything else besides being a lawyer (and am singularly unqualified for any other occupation!). If I could do it over again, I would have focused far less on the idea of doing something that was the most financially remunerative, and would have planned my course of study in college so that I would have had the option to try to do something I know I would have loved, that I had dreamed of doing since childhood – such as studying archaeology and going to graduate school, or continuing to study history in graduate school. (It was too late by my senior year to do that, because I hadn’t taken the necessary foreign language courses.) </p>
<p>(And besides, as it turns out, my career has not exactly been stellar anyway, at least financially, since my medical issues prevented me from working the hours that would have been necessary even to have a chance at partnership at the big NYC firm where I spent my first 16 years after law school. And I’m not sure I would have wanted to anyway. I’m not crying poverty; I do manage to get by financially at my job as “counsel” at a small firm, but I can’t help thinking sometimes of all my former law school classmates, few of whom I really believed were any smarter than I was, who are partners and law professors and have other amazingly successful careers. If I made what some of them do, it might make having to practice law a little more palatable! But I know that was never in the cards for me.)</p>
<p>In any event, given my own experience, I’ve advised my son, over and over, to study what he loves, and to pursue that as a career. I have confidence that he’ll figure out how to make a living doing something he actually enjoys. Based on my experience, that’s the most important thing he can do. And now, at age 19 in his second year of college, is when he has the opportunity to do it.</p>
<p>Plus, of course, I will always regret letting fear and shame rule my life, then and for the next 25 years, and not taking a path back then towards being myself earlier in life. Although I try not to be too hard on myself, because people with the courage to do that sort of thing back in the early 1970’s were few and far between, and I honestly would have had no idea how to go about it. And didn’t until the Internet came along! And besides, I wouldn’t have had my son, and that’s the most important thing of all. So the regret is really hypothetical, because even if I were magically given the chance to re-start my life at age 20, I wouldn’t take it; I’d rather go through what I went through for 100 lifetimes than choose not ever to have had my son.</p>