Hi Liz,
Thank you for your message, I hope this reply finds you well.
You had inquired as to whether this may have been some sort of coordinated hit job performed by disgruntled clients — the answer is “no.” I haven’t taken the time to read whatever the hell WSBA put up on their site, so cannot verify its veracity. That being said, I’ll give you the tl;dr version of my side of things.
My then-partner and I had just moved back to the area after a short stint in Philadelphia while she was studying at Penn. During that time, she had become pregnant, and we had decided to head back home and postpone her educational plans while the baby was young. Our daughter was born on August 30th, 2019. We all caught what we came to discover was COVID-19 a few weeks later. I was bedridden for three weeks. Our daughter was fine.
Then COVID lockdowns broke out. First, it was “two weeks to control the spread,” then it was “two months to get ventilators into ICUs,” and then it was “two years to develop a vaccine.” You already know all of this, so I won’t bore you with the monotonous slog that life turned into over those long and dreadful months. I will say that being trapped in a house with nowhere to go, having to take care of an infant 24/7/365 with no breaks, no grandparents to babysit, no aunties or uncles to babysit — nothing — was incredibly difficult. Not that I didn’t love our daughter, but the circumstances did take a large toll on my mental health. I attempted to take up hobbies to fill the time. Woodworking, gardening, music — anything to distract me from myself and the growing anxiety that permeated my being. The walls slowly closing in, the shadows on them subtly changing as a cloud passed overhead, the constant barrage of thoughts echoing in my mind without end — all of these things began to press upon me, like a shade stalking me through narrow alleyways.
I started to notice that I was losing time. It started off small — an hour or two here or there, usually while playing on my synthesizer. The warm, dulcet tones wafted through the cloistered space of the four walls which bound me, and I would lose consciousness for some time before reawakening. I thought to myself, “Self — we’re probably playing some beautiful bullshit during this time. We would do ourselves a favor to record it. Maybe there are some good ideas in there.” It was a brilliant idea. I bought a tripod with a light ring, got a mic, and began doing my thing. What I discovered was nothing short of shocking. At around 5-10 minutes in, each time, there would be a moment where something would switch. The technical ability would go through the roof. The style changed. The body language, usually stoic and upright, began swaying, like a sail billowing along with a truculent breeze on the open ocean. There was a flow, a mannerism, an ecstatic glow, and my mouth was agape at the scene. I began cutting and editing, selecting the best clips and posting them to TikTok to keep a public record of the impromptu performances of this person whom had possessed my body in those lost hours — my memory betraying me to keep that person’s identity safe.
I discovered the lost hours in December of 2021, after nearly two years of harsh lockdowns. Over the next two months, I began to hear the others rumbling about in my head — the ones I had always argued cases to the night before a hearing, pacing persistently around the perimeter of the living room, much to the chagrin of my then-partner. We had always done this, since we were young. Pacing, arguing, engaging in a Socratic dialogue all our own. We turned madness (though we had yet to call it that) to virtue and memorized entire case files, showing up to hearings without notes, to the astonishment of the bench. We honed arguments, raising point after counterpoint, parry, riposte. We lunged forward for the fatal strike and retreated on our back foot when threatened — because we had done it a hundred times before in the theatre of our mind. That theatre turned to Malebolge in our dreams. A Victorian mansion, flights of stairs, candles dark on burnt braziers, a hallway — infinitely long, with a black door at the end — unreachable…
We started drinking to quiet the voices as our sanity slipped away. This didn’t help, of course, but offered the only salve we had, not being able to seek out help in the doldrum of constant confinement. Everything began a slow collapse, and then, as Hemingway opines, we went bankrupt, “gradually, then suddenly.” Over those two months we lost our home, our partner, our child, our business, our law license, and our sanity. We were involuntarily committed to a psych ward because we were bereft of all hope, and to top it off, our home was burglarized while we were gone — so add our belongings to the list.
We were effectively homeless for a year after that, despite getting a job in IT. Our credit was wrecked by this point, so we weren’t able to find housing on our own. So, during that time, we couchsurfed, staying in a mix of extended stays and motels, and lived a few nights out of our truck. A friend of ours whom we split motel fees with for a while nearly died of an overdose, and if I hadn’t been there, he would not be on this Earth today. Eventually we landed with a family member for a few months who strangled us after losing his temper while arguing with his wife (which is its own story). We were in the hospital until early the next morning, getting CT scans of our neck and head. After that, it was more of the same. Couch, motel, truck, couch — the routine became rote and we slowly settled into our new reality.
Eventually, an angel fell out of heaven, a coworker who dragged us out of the gutter and found us a roommate and a place to stay. We got a case manager through our insurance company, who found a therapist who was qualified to diagnose mental health disorders, and specialized in the sort of dissociative experiences we were having. We’ve been seeing her the past two years or so. We began transitioning, and have slowly built a life away from Tacoma. We were diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder last year. We go by “Jess” now. We recently became unemployed during the recent wave of tech layoffs, and are now looking for work.
All of that is to say — the collapse of our legal career was not a conspiracy of clients, but rather a conspiracy of our mind, caused by a childhood of neglect and being locked in a closet at school for an hour each day for a couple years of our life, compounded by the concordant isolation and claustrophobia of COVID lockdowns. There are other unspeakable things which I shall not inflict on you by speaking them.
So, as to the present moment… We have no intention of practicing law again. The stress of practice was not good for our mental health. We’re presently not fit to practice, having been in three different psych wards over the same number of years, the most recent being last month. We’ve done an IOP program, kept up with individual therapy, and are doing around 15 hours a week of group therapy just to remain somewhat stable. That all being said, we feel like we did our time. We did good works. We had the tremendous honor and privilege to touch thousands upon thousands of lives in our pro bono family law clinic, in our sliding scale and flat fee practice, and in our volunteer work with WSBA. We got buy-in for an incubator program, which was eventually realized as our Rural Residency Program, which will ensure access to justice for underserved communities and employment opportunities for new and young lawyers for decades to come.
So, that being said, we hope this unfortunately lengthy correspondence reaches you well, and wish you all the best as you move forward through the great tempest that is life.
Sincerely,
Jessica Carter, J.D.