I had a not-rotten couple of weeks — my new meds are working — but I’m back in a funk. I’m having terrible eye-strain headaches from 12-hour days at the computer. Stress kept me from sleeping for three straight days, which actually made me bill GREAT hours because I was way too tired to think at a normal sort of speed.

That day, coincidentally, the Journal of the ABA had a story about how associates want to lower billables in exchange for a pay cut and partners don’t want associates to lower billables. One of the rationales given was that partners can’t tell who’s a really good lawyer without the metric of hours. So backwards. First of all, your law firm is TOO LARGE if you can’t tell by reading their work who’s good and who sucks. And secondly, when I’m doing good work, I work quickly and don’t bill very many hours. When I’m exhausted and doing shitty work, I bill TONS of hours because it takes me forever.

I’m sure clients are delighted to be paying ridiculous amounts of money for me to stare blankly at a screen and type a word every few minutes because I haven’t slept in days on end. I know that’s EXACTLY the high quality work they want with the kind of billing inflation they need.

This past month I’ve been having panic attacks like it’s going out of style. It’s been five years since I last had them, and suddenly I’ve had like six this month alone.

My doctor is tweaking my meds, which is doubtless part of the problem. Things that have panicked me so far this month include sudden movement, spousal bickering, an overwhelming to-do list, having to drive my car, the department store, and something else I can’t remember. Spousal bickering is the one that bothers me the most, because if you’re married to someone, have a bout of bickering over whose turn it is to do the dishes, and your spouse not only bursts into tears but goes into a full-on panic attack, how are you going to feel about that? Chances are, depending on your relationship, either manipulated, or rotten and guilty for setting a panic attack off, or frustrated and like you can never talk again for fear of setting one off. My husband feels guilty. It’s not his fault, and I feel guilty that I made him feel guilty. Ah, the circle of love.

Panic attacks are horrible. People describe them as feeling like you’re dying, or having a heart attack. Mine definitely fall in the heart-attack category. I start gasping for air, usually crying and/or sobbing, and then I start shaking uncontrollably and usually break out in a sweat. I get terrified to move. And almost by definition, all rational thought has stopped, so the fact that you are sobbing uncontrollably and shaking with terror while trying to start your own damned car you’ve been driving without a problem for six years does not strike you as at all unreasonable.

After several years of therapy I can at least recognize one coming on, and I can usually gasp out to my husband between sobs “I’m having — a panic — attack.” But then all I can really do is sit somewhere and let the panic run its course, often while gripping my husband’s hand like a lifeline (it helps, it really does; it seems to keep me grounded in reality and it dampens the terror).

Afterwards, my body is so wrung out that I continue to shake for an hour or so after, and I feel exhausted, the kind of exhausted you have after you just got back from a really emotionally-draining funeral. I often get chills afterwards (maybe because of the sweating) and I have trouble concentrating. Sometimes (but not always) I have a killer, migraine-ish headache afterwards. I watch a lot of sitcom reruns during the aftermath specifically because they’re distracting but require no brainpower.

So that’s what I’ve been going through basically weekly. My doctor’s given me some Xanax as a panic attack “rescue medication” (that is, you use it at the onset of the attack, rather than as a daily drug) which really does help to reduce the duration and intensity of the attack, and makes the aftermath less horrible, but obviously does nothing to prevent the attack in the first place.

Living with me is really unpleasant right now.

So it’s Monday and life doesn’t suck yet, but I have two things on my to-do list that I know is going to MAKE life suck, so I’m sitting here dawdling (and blogging) and not billing hours because I just can’t bear to dig into this and trigger a depressive episode.

On the plus side, my desk is SPECTACULARLY clean.

It’s surprising how long you can actually sit and do nothing before the world falls down around your ears, as long as you don’t mind the dearth of billables.

This actually turned out to be a rotten depression day. I had to take some time alone in my office at noon to just cry — which, of course, professional women can’t do — and my afternoon has just been one long slog of trying not to give in to crying again.

That’s really all you need to know here. I’m not talking bummed about life, I’m talking big honkin’ major clinical depression requiring daily medication to keep me a functional member of the human race.

This is not actually the law’s fault. They say that 1/3 of lawyers are depressed or having problems with addiction, mostly because of the law (compared to 1/10 of the general population). I was actually depressed long before I got to the law, diagnosed in my teens. But I did really well, on and off medication, until I got to law school.

I have not been off medication since.

I went to law school straight from college, which was probably an error in judgment, but I had a liberal arts degree. What else was I going to do?

So here I am, in my late 20s, married (no kids, yes pets), homeowner, practicing lawyer, and I’m so depressed I can barely get out of bed in the morning. Days I can work from home I don’t even bother to shower. I have no immune system because of the depression; a kid sneezes down the block and I catch a cold.

I live a block from an elementary school, so a lot of kids sneeze down the block.

I am constantly under the weather with some bug or another. I throw up from stress. I haven’t slept unmedicated in several months. I have pain in my teeth with no physical cause. I have recurrent infections that flare up every time I have to go to court, meaning I don’t think I’ve ever actually been to court without an earache. I am 60 pounds overweight, almost all of it since I started practicing law.

I can’t get out.

I practice in what’s called a “secondary market.” My husband and I are both graduates of a top-10 law school (that’s where we met), so this was a lifestyle choice for us after a couple years in an primary east-coast market. If we hadn’t moved to a secondary market, we’d probably be divorced, and I would probably be dead. I mean that literally. I like my secondary market — lawyers are more collegial, work knocks off at 5 unless you have major litigation, people leave early or schedule court around kids’ baseball games.

But the downside of my secondary market is that there aren’t a lot of options for getting OUT of the law. I have a mortgage and together we have over $100,000 in student loans, on a secondary market salary. There’s a lot of engineering, computer science, and medicine jobs to be had around here, but, again, liberal arts degree. I’ve searched desperately. Now I’m working half-time and freelancing at not-law things half-time, which helps, but I still lie there awake at night and think things like, “What kind of accident would get me a big enough tort settlement that I wouldn’t have to work as a lawyer, but wouldn’t be permanently debilitating?” or “Maybe if I got pregnant, I could quit.” I think the second thought is more normal.

I’m writing into the void because I have got to do something. Therapy, drugs, reduced work schedule is all very nice, but I’m still ridiculously depressed, and if I don’t vent this somewhere I’m going to go postal.

There are not a lot of resources out there for professionals with depression, and I think in a lot of ways it’s the expectations of the profession that traps me. If I’m open about my depression, will I still be able to get clients? Will employers want me? Do people trust a lawyer who goes home every night and sobs? If I called my local mental health agency which helps find employment for the mentally ill, would they laugh their asses off? I bet they would.

So here it is, a way for me to vent and think and suffer out loud. Don’t care if you read or not. Just gotta get it out.