Freaky Friday: The Life I Wish I Had vs. The One I'm Actually Living

There's a video game I can't stop thinking about. In it, you own a tiny bookshop in a small town. Your job is to arrange the shelves, talk to regulars, restock tea, watch the seasons change outside the window. It's meditative. The pace is yours. There are no billable hours. No clients asking for discounts. No file systems that collapse under their own weight.

I've spent maybe forty hours in that game.

I've spent forty years becoming a lawyer.

Sometimes I calculate which one has paid better.

The Substitution

Here's what nobody tells you about being bipolar and ambitious: your brain doesn't run on Monday-to-Friday time.

I operate in sprints. Three days of hyperfocus where I'll write briefs until 3 AM, see patterns in case law that other lawyers miss, close deals while everyone else is still drinking coffee. Then I crash. Not a little tired. A wall. My nervous system just... stops. I can barely answer emails. The idea of a client call feels like climbing Everest in flip-flops.

This is incompatible with law practice. Law runs on steady, predictable rhythms. Court dates don't move for your brain chemistry. Filing deadlines don't care that you need three days in bed this week.

So I learned to fake it. I learned the rhythms of someone who isn't bipolar. I learned to show up Monday morning like my energy regenerated on Sunday night, like I'm a person who operates on normal time.

I'm not.

The Real Tension

But here's the thing: it's not actually about the bookshop.

If you swapped my life for the tiny bookshop owner's tomorrow, I'd probably burn it down by Thursday. I'm ambitious. I like solving problems. I like the win of closing a deal. I like that law lets me do something.

The tension isn't bookshop vs. lawyer.

It's this: I became a lawyer to prove I could. And now I'm stuck proving it every single day.

When I almost gave that client a discount below my standard rate, it wasn't because I'm kind. It was because somewhere in my chest there's a voice that still doesn't believe I deserve to charge what I'm worth. Not because the work isn't good. It's good. But because the version of me that exists inside my profession still feels like she's pretending.

Like I'm playing the part of a lawyer instead of being one.

And the longer I'm here, the more I realize: that's not a legal problem. That's an identity problem.

What the Game Got Right

The tiny bookshop game gets something right that my actual life keeps getting wrong.

In that game, you're not evaluated by external metrics. You're not competing against other bookshop owners in your region. You're not worried that someone will figure out you don't belong. You're just... tending something. Day by day. At your own pace.

There's dignity in that. There's permission in that.

The bookshop owner wakes up when her energy allows it. The bookshop opens when she opens it. If she needs to close on a Tuesday for reasons no one else understands, she closes. If she spends an afternoon reorganizing one shelf because her brain is wired to see seventeen ways it could be better, she does that.

She's not wrong for operating that way. She's just operating.

What I'm learning—slowly, exhaustingly—is that there's no version of my life where I get to do that as a lawyer. Not in My Town. Not in a profession built on credibility and meeting other people's deadlines.

The law doesn't let you ask: "What if I just... did this at my own pace?"

The Bipolar Specificity: My Chuck Moment

Here's where it gets complicated. My bipolar isn't separate from this. It's the thing that makes the tension real.

I've known I was bipolar since 2017. Five years I've known. And I did nothing about it.

There's a character in Better Call Saul—Jimmy McGill. He spends the entire show trying to be Saul Goodman while simultaneously trying to be the lawyer Chuck thinks he should be. Chuck records his confession. Forces him to face what he is. And Jimmy breaks open and just... accepts it. Embraces it. Becomes Saul fully, without apology.

But then Chuck dies. And Jimmy realizes: I had to watch my brother destroy himself to give myself permission to be myself. And I'm still not sure if that permission was worth it.

That's my story, except the person I was trying to prove myself to was me.

In 2022, I had a manic episode so severe I couldn't hide it anymore. I had to go on medication. Finally. After five years of knowing and avoiding. Five years of pretending I could manage it with sleep and structure and will. Five years of not taking the bipolar seriously because taking it seriously meant admitting I couldn't be the person I'd built my entire identity around: the reliable lawyer. The one who shows up. The one who doesn't have a broken brain.

The medication did something I didn't expect. It didn't just stabilize me. It made me see how bipolar I actually am. It was like someone turned on a light and suddenly I could see all the patterns I'd been missing—the sprint-and-crash cycles, the times I'd almost made terrible decisions during hyperfocus, the way I'd been managing crisis instead of managing rhythm.

My switch flipped. Like Jimmy's. Except instead of embracing Saul Goodman, I had to embrace someone I'd been running from: the person who's wired different.

And like Chuck's death, there's a grief in that. I lost five years trying to be someone I'm not. I lost money undercharging because I thought I wasn't worth full rate. I almost destroyed my practice because I refused to admit my brain doesn't work like everyone else's.

It took crisis to make me honest.

The Delayed Reckoning

This isn't new territory for me, actually. I have high blood pressure. I've had it since university. Fifteen-odd years of knowing. And I did nothing about it. Until one government doctor, in my late thirties, literally scolded me. Told me to start taking it seriously. Said: you have a chronic condition and you can either manage it or die from it.

Something about hearing it that bluntly—from a stranger, not my own voice in my head—made it real.

That's when I started medication for the BP.

Fast forward: turns out when you actually manage a chronic condition instead of white-knuckling through it, your life improves. Revolutionary, I know.

The bipolar is the same. I knew. I avoided. I crashed. Now I'm managing. And for the last two years, actually managing—not just surviving—I've learned what my real pace actually is. What my real needs are. What I'm actually capable of when I'm not burning out.

Every time I ignore my own rhythm and force myself into the lawyer's rhythm, I'm not just tired. I'm dysregulating a condition I know I have. And dysregulation + high-stakes work = mistakes. Missed deadlines. Undercharging. Almost breaking professional standards because I'm depleted and not thinking clearly.

My brain is literally wired different.

And for fifteen years, I spent all my energy pretending I was someone else. The medication forced me to stop. To see. To accept.

But my body kept score.

What Freaky Friday Actually Means

The game frames it like magic: wake up in someone else's life, live their day, swap back.

But the real Freaky Friday already happened to me. I woke up inside a lawyer's life and realized: this isn't my day to live. This is someone else's rhythm, and I've been trying to fit my bipolar brain into their neurotypical schedule for so long that I forgot what my own pace feels like.

The terrifying part? I'm not sure I can go back.

I chose law. I got the degree. I set up the practice. I'm competent. I help people. And I genuinely don't know if I'm unhappy because I chose wrong, or if I'm unhappy because I'm trying to live at someone else's tempo.

Maybe the real issue isn't that I want to own a bookshop.

Maybe it's that I want permission to work like my brain actually works. And the law—at least in my town, in my practice, in my head—won't give me that permission.

The Life I'm Actually Living

So here's where I am: I'm a lawyer. I'm bipolar. I'm in a town I didn't choose. I'm trying to build a practice at a pace that doesn't match my neurochemistry. I'm undercharging because some part of me still thinks I don't deserve to take up space. I'm tired in ways that sleep doesn't fix.

And I'm not going to own a tiny bookshop.

I'm going to keep doing this. Keep filing briefs. Keep managing clients. Keep showing up on Mondays even when my brain didn't get the memo that weekends end. Keep trying to earn credentials in a system that was designed for people whose brains run differently than mine.

But maybe—and this is the small thing I'm learning—maybe I can stop pretending I'm someone else while I do it.

Maybe I can tell the truth about my rhythm. Maybe I can say: "I work in sprints, not marathons, and this is how I'm going to structure my practice around that."

Maybe I can stop undercharging because I believe I deserve to charge.

Maybe I can acknowledge that I'm operating on bipolar time, not lawyer time, and that's not a deficiency—it's just information.

And maybe—just maybe—that's the version of a lawyer I can actually be. Not the one in my head. Not the one playing a part. Not the one pretending she woke up in someone else's life.

Just me. Bipolar. Ambitious. Tired. Real.

Working at a pace that's mine.

I'll probably keep playing the bookshop game. Not because I want to escape. But because it reminds me what presence feels like. What tending feels like. What it means to work at your own rhythm.

Maybe that's not the life I'm supposed to live.

But maybe—if I'm honest about how my brain actually works—it's the life I can actually build.