Sarah Cottrell: Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. I practiced law for 10 years and now I help unhappy lawyers ditch their soul-sucking jobs. On this show, I share advice and strategies for aspiring former lawyers, and interviews with former lawyers who have left the law behind to find careers and lives that they love.

I'm super excited to share my conversation with Zi Lin with you today. Zi is a Collab member, and she used to practice law. Now she is working on making her living as an artist. There's so much good stuff in this conversation.

One of the things I did want to mention—after we stopped recording, Zi asked me to mention this on the front end something that she wasn't able to mention while we were talking, which was that she connected with a number of people in the Collab, met up with them, etc., during this process and found that to be particularly helpful. Because, as you know, if you're listening to this podcast, it can be very isolating and lonely to be a lawyer who is thinking about doing something else. One of the things that Zi said was very meaningful for her was being able to make those connections with other lawyers in the Collab. So she wanted to shout that out. So I am shouting that out to you.

Now we are going to listen to my conversation with Zi Lin. Hi, Zi. Welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast.

Zi Lin: Hi, Sarah. Thank you so much for having me.

Sarah Cottrell: Yay! I'm really excited for you to share your story for many reasons, which we'll get into. But before we get started, let's have you introduce yourself to the listeners.

Zi Lin: Hi, everyone. My name is Zi, and I used to be a lawyer. And now I can say that I am no longer a lawyer.

Sarah Cottrell: Yay!

Zi Lin: It's exciting. Proud former lawyer.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes! My particular enthusiasm is because Zi was part of one of the Guided Tracks that I ran a few years ago. Especially being in a guided track, I feel like you just get to know everyone in a very special way. Anyway, which is a small group for anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about when I say Guided Track. But that’s neither here nor there because I want to talk about your story.

I think it makes sense to start where we usually do on this podcast, which is: what made you decide to go to law school in the first place?

Zi Lin: Oh.

Sarah Cottrell: The classic. The classic sigh.

Zi Lin: Yeah. Looking back at it now, I feel like it was not a super well-thought-out decision. Going all the way back, I was a philosophy major in college.

Sarah Cottrell: Classic.

Zi Lin: Yeah. From the get-go, I knew somebody who was a couple of years ahead of me. He was like, “Oh, this is just what philosophy majors do. You get this degree and you go to law school.” I was like, “Okay, checks out.”

Yeah, sounds good. And that’s what I went on to do. I was looking around toward the end of college at what some of the other folks in my department were doing. It was like, you’re either getting a PhD in philosophy, which I knew I did not want to pursue. I loved undergrad philosophy, but I was like, I don't think it's for me to pursue a PhD. Then the rest were going to law school. So I was like, "Okay, well, law school it is."

Sarah Cottrell: You’re like, “Well, I’m not that type, so I guess I’m this other type.”

Zi Lin: Right. It’s like there are only two types. Of course, there’s A or B—not A, then I’m B.

Sarah Cottrell: I think many people listening will relate because that’s honestly true for quite a few majors. I think that’s true for a lot of political science majors—it’s like politics, law school, or PhD, basically. So I think there are a lot of people who end up in law school who are basically like, “Well, I guess I’m the person who fits in the law school bucket.”

Zi Lin: Yeah, yeah. It felt easier knowing where I was going to go because I do feel like, because I was a philosophy major—not the typical pre-med or business or tech or engineer—the Asian parents, you know, our relatives were like, “Oh, what’s happening with her?” And then when I said law school, it was like, “Oh, we understand that decision. That one we get.”

Sarah Cottrell: That’s really interesting. I think that’s a pretty common experience—like, “We don’t totally understand what you’re doing. Oh, we do understand this thing.” And so now you’re going to get lots of positive reinforcement and praise for that decision.

Zi Lin: Yeah, absolutely. People were just like, “Oh, okay, law school, great. Do you want to talk to so-and-so about this and this?” They were just like, you know, pat on the back, “Go, go forth, go take the LSATs, go get that prep course.” Whereas before it was just like, “What did you spend the last four years doing?”

Sarah Cottrell: Okay, so when you got to law school, were you like, “This was a terrible mistake”? Or were you just like, “I’m here and I’m doing the thing I’m supposed to do”? What was that experience like for you?

Zi Lin: I think it was the latter. It was like, "Okay, so I’m doing this. This is going to cost a lot, and let’s just see what happens." I honestly didn’t even know about Biglaw or anything like that. I was just like, people kept telling me, “The first year is the most important year.” And I was like, "Okay, I have it in me to give it everything I’ve got for this one year, and if it doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll drop out." So it was either 100% or zero—like, I’m just going to quit.

I didn’t even know what I was grinding toward. It was just school and going to class. Honestly, the first year of law school felt a lot more like high school than college. You’re with your cohort, your class, everyone’s moving through the same courses. It got very cliquey—there were the gunners, and then there were people who were just there. So I was just like, put my head down, do the work. If I get cold-called, I’ll just blurt something out.

I honestly liked that because I’m not very talkative in class, so I was like, if I can just check this box off, then the rest of the time I’ll be in the library studying. I don’t think I minded it as much as I thought I would. All the stuff was interesting. I actually enjoyed learning about the things in law school that first year and even later on. On an academic level, it was interesting to me. But we’ll get into it—the practice obviously—

Sarah Cottrell: Leave something to be desired.

Zi Lin: Yeah, yeah.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay, so let’s talk about how, you said, for example, that you didn’t even know what Biglaw was when you started law school—which, that was true for me as well. I had no concept of anything. But you get into law school, and so quickly there is this “Okay, well, this is what you do, and this is what you do next, and this is what you do if you’re doing really well,” and blah blah blah.

It’s just so easy, especially if you’re someone who’s a high achiever—which most people who go to law school are—to just be like, “Okay, these are the things that I do, these are the things that I’m supposed to achieve, accomplish, whatever, and I’m just going to go and do those things.” So I’m wondering for you if that was how you decided what to do coming out of law school or if the process was different.

Zi Lin: No, I think that’s 100% correct. I didn’t know the names of the firms, I didn’t know what the salary was, I didn’t know what the expectations were. But then, once you start doing well, they’re like, “Okay, here’s what you do with these grades. You slap them on the résumé, you do OCI, and then at the end of OCI, you’ll get a job offer.”

And I was like, "Oh," it’s like what happened in college with going to law school. “Oh, okay, that sounds good. Thank you for pointing out this path to me. I fit these boxes, so I’m going to go over there and follow this path.” Honestly, if it weren’t laid out that easily and that crisply, I might have done something different or thought harder. But because it was so structured and linear, and it just took all the thinking out of it for me, I was like, "Okay, I’m going to go do this."

I did have one professor who, after OCI, when I was like, “Oh, I’m going to this firm,” he was like, “Oh, okay, law school puts you on this path. It puts you on this conveyor belt. But you really gotta—” He was basically telling me I really needed to go think for myself. At the time, I wasn’t able to fully ingest and break down what he was trying to tell me. It didn’t land until much later.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Because I think what you were describing—the word that came to mind is “inevitable.” There really is that sense of “What even is there to think about?”

Zi Lin: Yeah, no, inevitable is a good way of describing it because it just seemed like that is the outcome. What else would I be doing? Everyone’s saying that I should be doing this. All the administrators, all the adults, my parents—they were like, “Oh yeah, of course. You’re going to get what kind of job? Go for that.”

Sarah Cottrell: For sure. And I think, to your point, there are the pressures that are internal to the profession, and then there are the external pressures and influences of family or, for example, if you were a smart kid who ran with the smart kids in high school—which was true for a lot of people who ended up in law school—there’s this, “Well, this is the kind of thing that we all do,” whatever that means. I’m doing air quotes, which no one can see. So I think it does make it just like, “Well, this is just the next thing.”

Zi Lin: I definitely was part of a group of kids who were smart, but they were all smart in math and science. So I think in high school I felt like I was the “not smart,” because I was on the debate team and not the math team or the robotics team. They all went on to be engineers, and I was a philosophy person.

It wasn’t until I got to law school and suddenly I was doing really well, and I was jumping through all these hoops and getting all of these things to slap on my résumé—these gold stars—that I was like, “Oh, so this is what it feels like to have all the external validation and to be ‘smart.’” It was an interesting dynamic where I was like, “Oh, this is pretty good.” Everyone in my life understood what this was, and they were happy for me. But, you know, the things that came later made this challenging.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m sure many people who listen to the podcast relate to like the harbinger of doom. Okay, so let’s talk about when you start at the law firm. What is it like? Are you basically in the same “Well, this is just what I’m doing because this is what I’m doing,” and not really thinking about whether it’s good or bad? Or what was that experience like for you?

Zi Lin: It definitely started out the same. I just put my nose back to the grindstone and kept plugging away and working. But I think the social dynamics of the firm caught me off guard. I went straight through, so besides internships over the summer, I had never worked a corporate job. Navigating interpersonal relationships with your class year, counsel, and partners—it freaked me out, honestly. In some situations, I just did not know what to do.

When you’re a junior, you’re definitely rewarded for working really hard. People will take notice if you produce good work consistently and are always trying hard. But I’m not schmoozing, you know what I mean? I wasn’t socially fitting in almost, or that’s how I felt. It was hard for me to find my place. Because I felt kind of out of place and off shape, the anxiety just kept building and building.

So there were two separate forms of anxiety: “Am I producing good work? Is this the quality they’re looking for?” and “Am I behaving in a socially acceptable way in this environment?” It was just those two spinning constantly.

Sarah Cottrell: I think it’s interesting—I had two thoughts as you were talking. One is that—and I know this has come up on the podcast many times before—especially in these large law firm environments, there is a huge mismatch between what they say is true about their environment and what they're doing, what they value, and what’s actually happening and is being valued. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance there for everyone, right?

They’re like, “We care about your mental health,” and also they’re having you work for people who are abusive. There’s that piece of it. But then also, I’ve worked with a lot of lawyers who either have ADHD or are autistic, or both—some variety of neurodivergence. I find that, in particular, if you’re someone with that experience—which my family is very neurodiverse, which is why it sticks out to me—especially if you’re a lawyer who’s neurodiverse, so for anyone who's listening, because I know lots of people listen who have that experience, you are much more likely to look at the situation, look at what people are saying, and expect it to be true.

The fact that something completely different is true, it’s basically as though people are lying, because they are, right? We know there’s a very high incidence rate of, for example, ADHD in the profession. It’s at least twice what the general population has. So I think you also end up in these environments that are so “We say one thing, we do another,” that’s extremely disorienting for people coming into it—especially if you have a neurotype like that. Then there’s all sorts of other stuff. I could go on a whole mediocre white man rant, but I won’t do that right now.

Zi Lin: No, I think it’s really true. To your first point, that’s exactly how I was experiencing it. There was such a gap between what people would say about what the firm culture was supposed to be like and what the values were, and then how people acted. I had a mentor who we had this discussion about authenticity and “bringing your whole self to work,” and just being who you are, not making this really stressful job even more stressful by constantly pretending to be somebody else.

I was like, in this environment, it’s literally impossible for me to not pretend to be somebody else. I do not feel safe to bring my “whole self” anywhere close to this workplace.

The whole self remains safe somewhere. Then I have the work self that is purely constructed and constantly iterated on to fit into this space and be whoever you, the mentor, want to see today, be whoever the other partner or counsel wants to see today, whoever my coworker. That dissonance is what eventually made me realize that at least Biglaw culture was just not for me. I could not keep carrying on finding ways to distort and contort myself to fit expectations that I was not really understanding.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that’s super real. The reality is, even when people say “Bring your whole self to work,” it actually means “Bring your whole self assuming yourself fits into these parameters,” which were mostly formed in a white supremacist patriarchal society. To your point, people will say, “Oh, bring your whole self to work, how will people know you if you’re not?”

And it’s like, okay, but there has to be emotional and psychological safety for someone to do that. Doing that in a situation that is psychologically unsafe is irrational. You’re asking people to do something that is irrational, which fundamentally, in my mind, is one of the significant problems of organizations structured like Biglaw firms. They ask people to do things and do not provide the psychological safety for them to actually be able to do them.

Zi Lin: Yeah, no, that’s 100% my experience. There are just certain things that you, as my mentor, can say because you feel safe in this space—because you’re a part of it and accepted. Telling someone, “Just bring yourself to work, it’ll be great,” I’m like, "Oh no."

Sarah Cottrell: You're like, "Actually, you would not. But thanks, thank you for that."

Zi Lin: I can see how difficult that can be for people who are neurodivergent, because the workspace is also not really set up to accommodate or be friendly to people with ADHD and autism. With the way Biglaw is structured, how are you expecting authenticity from people on any level?

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, well, it’s extraordinarily ableist among other things. So okay, can you talk a little bit about the timeline? Because I’m wondering, how long was it before you were like, “Oh, this isn’t just some one-off stuff. This isn’t just whatever—this is a fundamental mismatch for me, and I need to start thinking about something else”?

Zi Lin: I think COVID really shifted a lot of the way that I was thinking about the job. It was a pretty terrible time across the board for a lot of different reasons, but the one silver lining out of the lockdown was that it made me realize the law—at least Biglaw culture—was not where I wanted to be.

I think I was a third-year when lockdown happened. So it was three years of nonstop going, where I felt these issues but was willing to ignore them because I was like, "This is still what I’m supposed to be doing." You just follow these steps, and eventually you either make partner or you go to a different firm or do something—one of the exit options. That’s what I was telling everybody, and that’s what I was telling myself.

Then COVID happened, and my work life shrank to the three feet between my computer desk and the bed. Every day it was just: get up out of bed, roll to the computer desk, work, and roll back to bed, and then back again. I was like, "This is unsustainable on so many levels."

It gave me a lot of space because everyone was home, and weirdly, since everybody was home, I was able to reconnect with a lot more friends that I hadn’t seen in real life because I was so busy. I felt like I never had time. I was always like, “Oh, not this weekend because of X, Y, and Z reason.” It turned out to be not a real reason, but the job made it feel like I could not step away from my desk. Even if I was hanging out with somebody, I’d be on my phone all the time, waiting for the email to come in or the shoe to drop. I’d be like, “Oh no, I gotta go back to the office or do this and this.”

Over COVID I was like, "Life can look different for me because it's looking different right now." Connecting with people who are not lawyers, who don't really understand, who have never heard of the firms, who don’t care if you’re ranked whatever—it was just eye-opening. I feel like I had been in this lawyer bubble for so long, and all I cared about were these lawyer-related things—rankings, prestige, how busy I am, looking busy, appearing busy, my billables, and stuff. Just having time to reconnect with folks who did not care at all about that was super eye-opening. I was like, “Oh.”

Sarah Cottrell: You’re like, “Wait.” That is so interesting. I know we’ve talked about it on the podcast before, but it really is true. I actually think sometimes people who are not necessarily as on their way out as the people I typically work with, when I say this, get a little mad at me—and I get it—but it’s like, it doesn’t matter if you’re at a top, like a Vault 5 firm. It doesn’t matter to most people. They don’t even know. It could be like a two-person shop.

I’m not saying that those achievements or that hard work don’t matter at all, but the idea that it’s a soul-defining thing, that everyone would care about it and value it equally, is just so far from the reality of the world we live in.

Zi Lin: Yeah, I think that’s totally true. Every time I used to go to the doctor, they would mispronounce the firm name.

Sarah Cottrell: Sorry, that just makes me laugh.

Zi Lin: Right? It was just horrible, but I was like, "Yeah, unless you’re a lawyer or have lawyers in your family or your work brings you into contact with legal stuff—even then, no one cares." People are like, “Oh, where did you work?” You tell them the name of the firm, and they’re like, “Oh, okay.”

Sarah Cottrell: They’re like, “Wow, cool.” You literally could have said anything. You could have literally said anything.

Zi Lin: Yeah, like it could have been “fill in the blank,” and they’d be like, “Oh, yeah, interesting. Great.” And I was like, “Yep.” But to people on the inside, like what you’re saying, it matters so much. It’s not that we’re saying it doesn’t matter at all, but the weight of it just doesn’t translate outside of this bubble. It’s like moving to a new town and being like, “I can be anybody I want. They don’t know who I am.”

Sarah Cottrell: Well, and to your point, I think a huge piece of being able to step outside of that is having relationships with people who are not in that bubble, which is very hard when you’re working a job that takes up most of your time and mental and physical and emotional energy. A lot of people do end up in a situation where most of their social circle is lawyers because that’s who they’re around 90% of the time. It can be hard to access the perspective that there are other perspectives.

Zi Lin: Yeah, for sure. It wasn’t until COVID happened and people were perpetually home and online that I finally got to step outside of that. I was like, “Oh yeah, people log off their work at five, and they just hang out and play video games all night and chill.”

Sarah Cottrell: You’re like, “What? I’m sorry, what is that?”

Zi Lin: When you tell them, it's like, “Oh no, I can’t log on yet,” they’re like, “But it’s seven. What are you still doing?” And I’m like, “It’s only seven. There’s the rest of the evening. I have so much.”

Sarah Cottrell: Well, and it’s interesting because I think a lot of people who are lawyers would be like, “Who would want to—” Basically, there’s sometimes a sense that having hobbies is childish, as opposed to being a well-rounded human who has interests other than purely working. There’s almost this shaming of, “How dare you just want to do other things,” especially if those things are perceived as frivolous.

At least in my experience, for myself and for the people I work with, a big part of being able to figure out what you want to do with your work life is being able to just be yourself and have things you like to do that are hobbies.

Zi Lin: Yeah, that sounds right. I feel like a lot of times you ask people what they do, and it’s a lot of just traveling or drinking, or traveling and like, “I enjoy wines.” And I’m like, “Oh, this is not relatable.” But it does feel like there’s a divide between what’s a proper adult hobby that a lawyer or professional of a certain kind is supposed to have—at least in my mind—and my hobbies, which are like, “I’m going to get on a video game for five hours.”

Sarah Cottrell: Right, like, training for a marathon is not a waste of your life, but playing video games is.

Zi Lin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Built into the “bring your whole self” and “be authentic” person, people talk about what they’re into or express their interests, and certain people can deck out their entire office in their particular, felt like accepted hobby of their choice. But the second you say, “I like anime” or “I like video games,” they’re just like, “Oh…”

Sarah Cottrell: They’re like, “Okay, well.” Okay, so tell me—when you had this realization of "My life doesn’t need to look like this, and that a lot of people’s professional lives don’t look like this," can you talk about whether it was hard to get to that conclusion for you? Because on the podcast, we often talk about the pressure, both internally, but also I know you mentioned your family being like, “Yes, you’re becoming a lawyer. This makes sense.” Can you talk a little about that?

Zi Lin: I think coming to the realization that I didn’t want to do this and actually taking steps to leave—there was a really long lag. Because of the things you’re saying, in my head I was like, “I worked really hard to get here. Everyone in my life has accepted that now she’s a lawyer, she’s okay, things are all set.” Being a lawyer means she's going to follow these steps to do these things, she'll make this her career. There were all these expectations, a lot of it were mostly in my own head.

In my mind, I was like, “I hate this but I can’t actually leave because my entire world is going to fall apart. But also, I hate this, but I can’t leave.”

Sarah Cottrell: It’s a terrible feeling.

Zi Lin: Yeah, it is. It was weird because I was like, "I should be really happy about where I am on so many levels." I was like, “Why am I not happy? Why am I so unhappy? Why do I feel like I hatet it so much? Why am I dreading going into the office? Why am I dreading seeing people? Where is all this coming from, and why am I not happy?” It was almost like, “What is wrong with me right now?”

And I couldn’t do anything about it because if I acknowledged that there was something wrong with me or tried to fix it, my world would fall apart. Everyone would be like, “Oh no, she couldn’t make it, she broke.” But also, I had this deep internal dread and anxiety and hatred for the thing I was doing.

Sarah Cottrell: Can you tell me how you went from that to being in a position where you were actually willing to really walk away? And to the extent it’s relevant, if you want to talk about the Collab and the Guided Track in there, or separate that out, that’s fine too.

Zi Lin: I remember when I was going through this—going back and forth, “I hate it, but I can’t go”—I would doom scroll. I couldn’t sleep. Some of the stuff I read made me feel even more demoralized. I remember this one article I came across from a recruiter that basically said, “Oh, you want to leave Biglaw?” The TL;DR to me in my mind was, “You’ll be worthless.”

They were like, “Once you leave, you’ll never work on cases as big or prestigious. Your clients will never be these Fortune 500 or massive bank companies. The work you do will never be as interesting or meaningful. You’ll never make a headline.” And I was like, “Oh my God, that’s what’s waiting for me? I gotta go back. I’ve got to think harder.”

I was stuck in this thinking loop. Then, speaking of the Collab, I remember one night I was just fed up. Instead of looking for what else I can do in law, I literally typed in, “Can I do anything else with this law degree?” I hit enter, and then I saw the list on your blog.

And I was like, “Oh.” I was like, “Look at this. Where was this?” Looking for the right thing. It was like, "Oh, my God." That was just another eye-opening moment because I was looking through that list and thought, “You can be a firefighter, you can be an artist, you can make jewelry, I could open a bakery.” It felt like, “This is what I was looking for—someone to tell me there’s life beyond Biglaw,” a positive, not the “you’ll be worthless” person.

Sarah Cottrell: It makes me so happy. I can’t even—okay, I’m going to—okay, so tell me what happened next.

Zi Lin: I probably binge-listened to so much of the podcast. I was like, “Oh my gosh, let me hear this person’s story, and this person’s story.” Even though your community, the website, the blog, and the podcast had given me so much hope, it was still really hard for me to take actual steps.

I found a lot of the podcasts to be inspiring, but then a day later, I’d be like, “But that person had this and this, and that person had become a partner and then decided to leave.” And I’d think, “Oh, I haven’t gotten there yet. I obviously didn’t try hard enough. I haven’t earned the leap.”

So it was constantly like, “It’s so wonderful to hear that she or he was able to move on, but I am not that person. I am not there yet. I don’t deserve that yet.” It was this weird, “I haven’t tried hard enough at this thing that I hate, and it’s killing me emotionally and physically, so I don’t deserve to leave.”

Sarah Cottrell: Like you haven’t earned it. You haven’t earned it via your misery.

Zi Lin: Yeah. It sounds really weird to say this now, but there were times where you’d go into the office and people would be talking, and they’d be like, “Oh, I cried on the way to work every day this week.” And in my head, I’d be like, “Oh, I only cried on Sunday. Clearly not trying hard enough.”

Sarah Cottrell: Oh, my gosh. Oh my gosh. It’s not funny, but it’s like gallows humor because it’s so real.

Zi Lin: Yeah, and I was like, “They’re on three cases at once, one’s going to trial, they’re crying every day. I have to work harder at this.” And even then, they’re not leaving, so I can’t do that either.

Looking back at it now, I do feel like the body and the soul just stopped because that’s what it felt like. At one point, I just hit a wall. There was no way for me to continue with this work. I could not respond to emails. I could not function, basically. That’s when I knew, "This is probably the time."

I think that’s when I joined the Collab full-on and started with a Guided Track because I was like, “I need help. I’m not functioning at work anymore at any level.” That was probably the end. But I was so resistant to leaving and so indecisive and conflicted. It’s like the lawyer thing where you think thinking about it and marinating in thought forever will somehow make you think up the solution that solves all of your problems.

It just kept me stuck until there was no—well, I don’t want to make it seem like it was inevitable, but until it felt like to me there was no other option. I just had to get out.

Sarah Cottrell: I work with a lot of people whose trait is that they are highly responsible. I find that for people who identify that way, they almost have to get to a point where they’re physically/emotionally destroyed before they can admit that they need to do something else. Because they feel so strongly this sense of, “But I should be able to do it, and I can do it on some level.”

Zi Lin: Yeah.

Sarah Cottrell: And so, to your point, I think there are a lot of people—I'm sure there are a lot of people listening—who are that type of person, who are like, “Well, I can do it, so I should. It’s not as bad as X and such other person.” Competing in the misery Olympics.

Zi Lin: Yeah, I like competing in the misery Olympics. I was like, "I had not won the gold medal, so I’ve got to keep going."

Sarah Cottrell: You’re only getting the bronze.

Zi Lin: Yeah.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay, so can you talk a little bit about the overall process of actually figuring out what it is you were going to do next? To the extent that the Collab intersects with that, I think it would be helpful for people to understand that as well.

Zi Lin: Yeah. So I think I started with the Framework, and as part of the Guided Track, we had the CliftonStrengths workshop. I really loved that. It was super illuminating. It confirmed a lot of things that I knew about myself but could not verbalize. I thought, "None of the things that I scored high on matched up with being a litigator." I was like, “Oh.”

Part of the work of finding out what I wanted to do next was getting back in touch with myself, which, back then, I would not have framed this way. Towards the end of my time, a couple of months before I left the firm, I was in the Guided Track. I think the Guided Track came to an end. I think what happened was that the Guided Track was really helpful to finally get me to start taking action to leave.

Once I knew I was going to leave by a certain date, I was still like, “I don’t know what I want.” I wasn’t able to frame it that way at the time, but I felt so desperate and didn’t understand what was going on with me. I knew there were some workshops in the Collab from coaches, and I watched a bunch of those. I was like, “I really want to reach out and get a coach.”

I found Erin Conlon through the Collab, and that’s when things started blowing wide open for me. Honestly, on this journey out of law, I owe so much to you, the podcast, and the Collab, because a lot of things in my life totally changed when I found that list.

Just being in a community, what I really loved about having the Guided Track during those initial phases of me actually doing something about leaving Biglaw, it was nice to know that so many other people, I mean not nice, but that so many other people were struggling.

Sarah Cottrell: Were also in abject misery.

Zi Lin: Yeah. It was nice to have company, but not nice that the company I was having were other lawyers who were really fed up with being lawyers. But it was good to have that, to come on the call every week, talk through what we were working through. It was honestly the total opposite of working in Biglaw. It was a place where I felt like I could be authentic and bring my actual whole self, and it was totally safe. Do you know what I mean?

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, and I’m also trying not to be super verklempt. Oh, and for people listening, Erin was on the podcast, and that episode will be linked in the show notes if you want to listen to her and learn more about her from her perspective. But anyway, carry on with your story.

Zi Lin: Yeah, so I started working with Erin, and I’m still working with her. At least in the first year, I feel like all of the work was on changing my mindset and really cracking open how I can reconnect with myself, how I can work through, almost grieve leaving my lawyer career and identity. Back then, I didn’t have the vocabulary to even think of it that way.

But one of the joys and highlights of working with Erin is that suddenly I could describe my experience in a totally different way. I had so many hangups—I still do—about leaving the prestige and this career. But it’s like what I was saying about going to law school and getting the job in the first place. When you tell someone you’re a lawyer at a certain kind of firm, it’s an instantly recognizable thing, and you don’t have to explain yourself. You don’t get question-mark looks or blank looks.

But now, sometimes you tell people, “I left this lucrative, stable career, and I’m trying to pursue a new career identity as an artist,” and they’re just like, “In this economy? With AI? Like, what?”

Sarah Cottrell: It’s not the conversation ender that it might otherwise be.

Zi Lin: Yeah, no. Before, my partner—he’s in finance—so we’d introduce ourselves like, he’s in finance, and I’m the lawyer. And they’re like, “Oh, okay. Asian couple, got it. Checks out.” Now it’s like, he’s in finance, and I’m in… I make art.

Sarah Cottrell: Which is amazing, and I would really love for you to talk more about the art that you make, but I don’t want to go too quickly past the rest of the story. Are there other things you want to share before we talk about what you’re doing now?

Zi Lin: I think the only thing that I would say before is—it’s still a work in progress. I do feel like even coming onto the podcast and talking about it, I needed to have the external validating badges, almost, like, “Oh, I’ve done this and this since leaving the law. I’ve gotten this and this achievement. Look at this thing that I’ve done. Look at all the collaborations I’ve had, or the gallery opening, or that I sold stuff.”

Part of me is like, I don’t have some of those pieces yet, and part of me is trying to be okay with that. Because I think the whole process is just a process, and the space that I want to be in now is not that achievement-getting, hustle mindset. It’s, “This is who I am now. This is where I am. I’m a person that’s in progress.”

I don’t make art to give people a way to understand me. I don’t want someone to be like, “Oh, she’s an artist because she’s done this and this.” I make art for myself, and it’s messy, and I’m terrified of sharing what I do because, you know, it’s not that instantly recognizable, conversation-ending like, "Okay."

Sarah Cottrell: I think if you’re someone who became a lawyer, there’s this sense of, “I have to have certain external markers in order for other people to think I’m okay as a person.” Some of those things are manufactured within the profession, and some are artifacts of our culture more generally.

I actually just before this recorded a solo episode of the podcast where I talked about the things I commonly see in the first year after people leave a job practicing. One of the three things I talked about was this sense of, “Oh, you don’t actually arrive.” For some people listening, that probably sounds terrifying because it’s like, “But I want to arrive. I’m not at the right place, but I want to arrive at the right place, and then it’s going to be fine.”

But there's actually like this, it's hard, to your point, it's hard to describe in a way that people can fully understand, maybe in the way that your law professor was like, “You really need to think about whether you want to do it,” and you were like, “I don’t. Okay.” There is a freedom in realizing that it is a process and you are not just defined by whatever markers might impress some subset of people.

Zi Lin: Yeah, I think that's right. It took me a while, and I’m still working through it, to realize that there is no “I’m never getting there,” and there’s no defined “there” anymore. Because for so much of—even since becoming a philosophy major—just having at the back of my mind that law school is where I’m going to go, for all those years you have this thread that’s like, “Okay, the next stop is here, the next stop is here, and the next stop is here.” Suddenly, you get off the train and you’re like, “Okay, there are no more stops. There’s not even a train. I’m in the woods.”

Sarah Cottrell: I relate to this so much. Like so much. Just so much. Do you want to talk a little bit more specifically about the kinds of art that you make or the different types of things that you are spending your time creating?

Zi Lin: Yeah, I think my focus right now—I mostly work on, I mostly do digital art. And it’s actually kind of somewhat ironic, but what got me started was the firm gave out iPads, I think the year of COVID, like the massive lockdown year, to all the attorneys. People used them to give markups on the fly or pull up PDFs.

When they gave it to me, I asked, “Are there any firm things installed on the iPad?” and the tech guy was like, “No, it’s yours.” And I was like, “Cool, I’m going to put Procreate on it.”

Because I wasn’t ever a Mac user, and Procreate is only for iOS. I was like, “I’m going to learn to draw.” I’ve always drawn as a kid—that was one of the first things I started out doing. All through high school, I loved anime, I loved manga, so I would just copy and draw. But it’s not something people took seriously. It’s like, “Oh, that’s nice that she does that, but what is she going to do with her life in this serious professional way?”

It’s not that, because it doesn’t make any money. All of these myths about the starving artist, how you have to be super famous to make money from your art—that was all wrapped up there. But I installed Procreate, I was really excited about it, but then I didn’t have time to really work on it. I set it aside because I was like, “Everything I’m making looks so wonky. I’m out of practice. I need time.”

But you don’t have time when you’re working—or it feels like you don’t have time—so I didn’t come back to it until after I left. I was exploring and thinking about what else I could do, and it goes back to—I forgot the name of the person—but you interviewed a calligrapher.

Sarah Cottrell: Oh yeah, Shinah.

Zi Lin: Yeah. I remember listening to her episode, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that sounds amazing.” I’m not good at calligraphy or hand lettering, but being creative, doing this, just exploring and returning to this part of me that fell to the wayside or was neglected for so long, that’s what I want to do. I poured a lot of time into making art, and something that Erin suggested was, “Why don’t you put the art out there?” And I was like, at first, "No, absolutely not."

Sarah Cottrell: Like, "That sounds like a terrible idea."

Zi Lin: I have to immediately run away and hide. But then I did start posting. I joined different communities. I really got into taking Skillshare classes and interacting with teachers and creatives through that. Then I eventually discovered what I didn’t know was called surface pattern design, which is like putting art you see on things like fabric, plates, greeting cards, and that stuff.

So that’s what I’m pursuing right now: creating art that would go on things like fabric and other home décor, wall art, and things like that. I’m in the middle of learning how to establish myself in that space, get licensed, and really get out there.

Sarah Cottrell: So cool. It’s extremely cool.

Zi Lin: Thank you.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay, so I know we’re getting close to the end of our time, but is there anything else you want to talk about related to any of the things, or anything else you think people should know that we haven’t talked about yet?

Zi Lin: I guess maybe the one thing is, if you’re listening to this and you’re stuck where I was—just going back and forth, thinking that you can think your way out of it—but in your heart, gut, and soul you know that the law isn’t right for you, I would say just follow that feeling.

It took me a really long time to understand that that was my own intuition telling me, “GTFO.” And I was like, “No, no, the brain has other plans. The brain’s going to think it through. The brain is going to have a better solution. The brain is going to save up X amount of money.”

But meanwhile, intuition is just like, “No.” Because everything since leaving the law—my entire life has changed emotionally, mentally, physically. Everything is just so much lighter and so much better. It’s not worth it to stay in the misery Olympics. It’s not worth it to stay for this perceived prestige.

Sometimes I’m really afraid of showing people that I used to work with, or people who knew me as a lawyer, what I’m doing now. Because my first thought is, “Oh my god, they’re going to judge me. They’re going to be like, she left Biglaw with what kind of salary to do what? This is what she does now? Oh my god, she’s crazy.” That thought has never left. But now, having come out the other side, I know that I don’t have to listen to that. That’s just a thought in my head. Things are so much better where I am now.

Sarah Cottrell: The experience that you’re describing is the experience that so many people have. You don’t have to get to the point where you never think about what people might think in order to make a decision that is a better decision for you and your life. Okay, so if people want to find you and your art online, where should they go?

Zi Lin: Okay, so I think the easiest place is probably Instagram. I have two—one is for the business side, and that’s at @zori_nori. Then my personal art, where I post every day—it’s just like, I draw one thing every day and whatever it is, it just goes up—that’s at @garbage_collector_s.

In the profile for both of those, you can find links to some of my stores and other stuff. I also recently started and put up a portfolio website. Oh my gosh, it’s so new that I don’t remember the URL.

Sarah Cottrell: Well, if someone is interested, presumably they could message you on Instagram.

Zi Lin: Yeah, it’ll be in the Instagram bio. It’s like zori-nori.myportfolio.com. It’s through Adobe, and I can’t remember if Adobe is in the URL or not.

Sarah Cottrell: So go to Instagram, is what we’re saying. Those links will be in the show notes and in the blog post. We’ll put the Instagram links, and we can put the portfolio website link as well. Okay, Zi, thank you so, so, so, so much, so much, for sharing your story. I am really, really glad that people get to hear it. I feel really grateful to have been even a very small part of it.

Zi Lin: You were a huge part of it. I was like, "No, such a huge part." It feels like it’s coming full circle being on the podcast. This was wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.

Sarah Cottrell: Amazing.

Thanks so much for listening. I absolutely love getting to share this podcast with you. If you haven't yet, I invite you to download my free guide: First Steps to Leaving the Law at formerlawyer.com/first. Until next time, have a great week.