The Longest Days

I've never shirked from hard work, particularly when it's work I feel passionately about. And in the last year, I've definitely been pushed to my limits in terms of how much of myself I'm willing to give to something without sacrificing myself. It's a hard line to balance, and I think a lot of people spend a lot of their life figuring out where that line lays for them.

This week has been a week I've never imagined--I've never had to imagine--in terms of how far I can push myself, and how willing I am to push myself, for someone else.

My client's hearing is on April 11. We have 700 pages of documents to submit by Monday. They have to be perfect. We are the first "team" to have a hearing this semester in our clinic, meaning our deadlines are accelerated more than anyone else's. I've spent a couple of nights at school this semester working on various aspects of our client's case with my partner, but I had no idea what I was walking into when I left my house Tuesday morning at 8am. I had no idea I would not return to my apartment until Friday morning at 5:12pm, having slept for 3 hours total since leaving, and almost losing my mind in the process.

I've learned a lot this week--there are times for sacrificing what you need for the sake of someone else. There are also times when you need to step back to look at the big picture to evaluate the situation properly. There are hard conversations that need to be had with people, and sometimes the hardest ones yield the greatest results. Immigration is never black and white--there are always motives, conversations, details that we will never know.

But there are also the less tangible aspects of life: intuition--something we are born with and we can never ignore, there is belief in the good that lies at the heart of everything in everyone, and there is simple human resolve.

Fatigue is powerful, but so is drive. I never, ever want to remain awake for as many hours as I did this past week. It makes you unable to extricate yourself from the weeds of what you're working on. It's isolating and it makes you crazy. By Friday, when we expected to hand in our final draft of the documents we had poured ourselves into, when we got a shock from the government attorneys at 9am, we felt a soul crushing misalignment of life. We learned that no matter how prepared you are, no matter how hard you work, no matter how much you believe, there are always twists in the road.

I went home on Friday and slept from 5:30pm until 8:30am today. Every plan we had before yesterday has changed, and the reality of the situation has morphed into something that is almost unrecognizable from what it was just yesterday. But, in the clarity of rest, the drive does not wane. And that's encouraging.

I've learned that we do what we can. We work as hard as we can, but the work that we do will not always determine the outcome of the case at hand. No matter what I do, how well I plan, how hard I work and how many hours I remain awake will not guarantee the outcome we desire.

In the end, everything I've learned reaffirms what I already know: There is never a fault in extending yourself farther than you thought you could. We don't know what will happen in the next 14 days. But in the end, we'll know that we worked our asses off, maybe have made some wrong decisions, tried to make as many best decisions as we could, but will always believe in the actions we took..

The next 11 day will be hard. Really hard. But I know I have it in me. And I suppose sleep can wait a while, right?