The closest I ever got to being a lawyer was working with the Lisinski Law Firm out in Powell, OH. They found me on UpWork and had a cool opportunity for a writer to be on their team. I was getting paid very handsomely but it was too good to be true. My job was beautiful. Tragic, but beautiful. I would take the interviews and questionnaires of immigrants, mostly Mexican immigrants, and turn their answers into a story for their citizenship declaration package. It would be the first thing that immigration officers see and so it would have a touch of creative writing, pulling on heart strings and that sort. It was a very humbling job as I would read about men and women (mostly women) who suffered a certain type of abuse, this was a specialty of the Lisinski Firm, they were helping out people who had been a part of a toxic relationship that often times would mean they had done some illegal things like crossing over illegally which we would turn into a remorseful story.

It was a job that you felt, that I felt, was serving a bigger purpose. The weeks (ha!) I was there felt very good and I felt like I could do this job forever. Sadly, they hired way too many people and after about 4 weeks they slashed like 60% of their workforce. You’ve heard of group hires, like those panel interviews, but have you ever heard of group fires? Yeah, it was one lady from Lisinski and like 30 people on a Zoom talkin about “we overestimated how many people would reply to this position,” and she was nice and had cool hair but yeah that’s life and I haven’t heard from them since. It was fun and paid well and felt positive so I couldn’t really ask for more but boy do I wish I still had that gig. But if I did, chances are I wouldn’t be writing this blog! So I guess there’s always a silver lining somewhere.

I’m pretty sure I’m not at liberty to disclose any details about the cases I worked on but I have to tell you about this one case, it was nuts. Some of them may have exaggerated their stories a bit but this one lady had such an insane story I couldn’t even believe it was made up. Her mother died when she was like 6, her brothers (except one) and father were very abusive toward her, she dropped out of school at 10 because she was told to work instead. Her father remarried this witch lady who initially had the idea of her to drop out and work so that step-mommy could lounge around and do nothing. It was disgusting. Then, she crossed the border with some coyotes and met a man in the states. He’s a nice, docile guy. BUT, she has a few kids and her one daughter turns out to be a BITCH and is like super abusive toward her mom and dad and has basically been taking advantage of her mom since she could learn to do that. Like she’ll manipulate her by being crazy and yelling one moment to being totally calm the next and acting like nothing happened and expecting others to act like it’s all cool, I mean like real sociopathy shit it was nuts. This girl was breaking windows, mirrors, cars, and expecting her parents to pay for all of it no questions asked. It was just all bad. And to top it all off she still sends money back home to help take care of her father since all of her brothers are now just deadbeats. It was very sad and writing it took a lot of emotional heft but hey I’m sitting in a well-tempered room staring at multiple screens and typing on a quite pricy mechanical keyboard in Southern California, lil heft aint much.