It was 2.30am when I realised I was indisputably not cut out to be a corporate lawyer. My hands hovered, trembling, over the keyboard, the spreadsheet in front of me a blur. I’d barely slept, my stomach a knot of caffeine, cortisol and dread.
Somewhere down the corridor, another trainee was vomiting in the toilets. It was GDPR season – General Data Protection Regulation – that glorious time when every company in the UK updates their privacy policy at once. My inbox was a sea of unread emails and red flags.
I’d already billed over 50 hours, and it was only Wednesday.
My chest tightened. I could feel my heart pounding, too fast. I reached into my bag and popped a beta blocker under my tongue.
I waited. Nothing. Heart still racing, I popped two more, washing them down with lukewarm Diet Coke. My monitors flickered in the dark, alerting me to another email which contained another document which I needed to review.
I remember standing up, walking to the office bathroom, and staring at my face under the harsh fluorescent lights. My reflection looked ghostly – sallow skin, dilated pupils, mascara smudged under tired eyes, and a stress-induced rash that had taken up permanent residence on my jawline.
Still, I told myself, you’re lucky to be here. This is what you worked for.
That night – like so many others – I would go home at 4am, collapse into bed for three hours, and start again. Coffee in the morning. Adderall ‘uppers’ by noon. Beta blocker ‘downers’ by mid-afternoon. Xanax for anxiety. Wine to wind down. Sleeping pills to knock me out. It was a pharmaceutical timetable dressed as a routine.
Dorothy Herson was captivated by the idea of being a city lawyer while at university
But she discovered the lifestyle brought severe challenges
My body ran on chemicals and my mind tried to keep up.
I wasn’t partying or chasing a high, I just didn’t know how to be awake any more. This was a life I’d spent years working for – and now I was spending most of my time looking for ways to disappear from it.
Yet this was what I’d wanted, for so long. Not to be a lawyer, but to do well – to excel. I’d become addicted to that dopamine rush success gave me. The feeling of being best, the thrill of another top grade, the teacher’s nod of approval – it lit me up. Validation was my oxygen.
The education system feeds this hunger. You’re rewarded for being driven, disciplined, diligent and start to believe your value lies entirely in what you can produce.
I’d always been a high achiever; I left my comprehensive school in Reading with two A*s and an A at A-level, gaining a place at Warwick University to study English.
At university the idea of corporate law took hold. The firms came to careers fairs, offering glossy brochures and three-week vacation schemes in glass towers with rooftop views.
I wanted it – I wanted it all.
And I got it. After years of grinding exams and interviews, aged 22 I landed a training contract at a Magic Circle firm in the City – the elite of the elite – with a starting salary of £47,000, which would rise to £90,000 after I qualified.
The job became a race with no finish line which no one could win
When I got the call from the firm offering me a place, I cried. Not from joy, but relief. It was meant to be the finish line. Instead, it was the beginning of my unravelling.
When I finally arrived, the rules changed. No longer the top of my class, I was suddenly average, surrounded by Oxbridge graduates and borderline geniuses. Everyone worked harder, longer, later. Your worth was measured in six-minute billing increments. Utilisation statistics were circulated so you could see how many hours your peers were billing. It became a race with no finish line and which no one could win.
I stopped sleeping properly. My thoughts were always racing: did I get that clause right? Did I miss a typo? Would I qualify after the training contract?
When would they finally realise I was an imposter? A fraud?
At first, I tried to push through, ‘surviving’ on energy drinks and very little sleep. Then I found I couldn’t breathe in meetings and would cry in the toilets. I started making mistakes. The tighter I held on, the more everything slipped. Then came the pills.
A colleague handed me a Xanax anti-anxiety pill one lunchtime after I hyperventilated over an email. ‘This will help,’ she said. Later came Adderall, a stimulant normally prescribed for ADHD, which she got through a private prescription. ‘It helps you concentrate. Creative people take it,’ she said. I swallowed it without a second thought.
Soon, I needed my own supply, and found they were shockingly easy to order online. For a while, they worked, helping me to optimise; stay up later, focus harder, think faster.
But the effects didn’t last. Within weeks, one pill wasn’t enough to get the same results.
I started doubling the dose, then taking them earlier in the day, then chasing them with caffeine. The more I relied on them, the less they seemed to work – but by then, I was too far in.
The pressure to perform never eased. Quarterly appraisals. 4am emails. Partner expectations. Fear of being found out. I convinced myself I needed the pills to survive.
At one point, I was the most utilised trainee in the department – meaning I had worked more hours than anyone else.
Yet, it was never enough. The feedback on my appraisal was extremely negative. If this was what I got for burning myself into the ground, I wondered, what would happen if I slowed down?
Recognising I needed help, I used the firm’s private health care scheme to access a psychiatrist – while continuing to pop pills and drink heavily.
I cannot blame my employers for this; they didn’t hand me the pills and a bottle of vodka and tell me this was the way to go, I did it all to myself, in my pursuit of validation.
The problem wasn’t just my mental health, it was the system I’d internalised – a system that makes us utterly dependent on external approval to feel like we matter. Your worth is directly linked to your productivity, and in law your productivity was defined by how long you could stay awake and how few mistakes you made – even though the more burnt out you were, the more your attention to detail slipped.
And it was a system for which I was a terrible fit. I was academic, yes, but that trait was redundant in the corporate world where the only things that mattered were stamina and endurance. The ability to bulldoze your body and brain into submission, day after day, indefinitely.
My parents were worried about me and begged me to slow down, or at least take it all a bit more lightly, but I wouldn’t give up.
My first crash happened one day in 2017. I was living in a shared house with other lawyers and had taken the day off sick – which meant sitting at home, drinking gin. My flatmates were very worried and called my psychiatrist – who called me and ordered me to come into the hospital.
I stayed there for four weeks. Yet still, it wasn’t enough to convince me to stop.
After I was discharged, I went back to work – and back to my old ways – completing the final six months of my training contract in a daze of exhaustion, self-loathing, and hangovers.
At the end of it, after everything I’d endured to stay afloat, they told me they weren’t keeping me on. I felt humiliated. Spat out. Like all the pain, all the pretending, all the pushing through had been for nothing. I had been right to think I was a failure, an imposter; they had confirmed all my worst fears.
But still, I wouldn’t let myself stop. I moved to another law firm – and started the cycle all over again for another two years.
In 2019, I broke down again – this time for good. I finally had a chance to pause and see the chaos for what it really was and handed in my notice.
I wish I could say I walked away with dignity, but the truth is, without the job, the salary, the label, I felt hollow and grieved for the life I thought I was meant to have.
My identity had always been wrapped up in how I performed, how many gold stars I could collect. Without that stream of validation, I didn’t know who I was.
Addiction and alcoholism spiralled. I reached rock bottom over and over again. I became dependent on a rotation of unprescribed pills, all duly ordered online – anything to escape the crushing pressure of being awake in my own mind. I would knock myself out for entire weekends.
I remember one Christmas where I didn’t eat. I drank a bottle of Prosecco, took a handful of sleeping pills and passed out for 24 hours while my desperately worried family ate Christmas lunch downstairs. By February 2023, I’d been scraping by for years, living off my savings, odd jobs and trying my hand at writing, while desperately trying to keep myself together.
When a flatmate’s partner confessed she’d embarked on a 12-step programme to deal with her own addiction issues, I sat up and took notice. Two months later, I attended my first meeting. Of course, recovery is not linear; I didn’t get sober all at once. There were false starts and relapses.
In October, the death of someone I was close to romantically, and also my dog, saw me reach for the wine and sleeping pills once again, and I ended up in hospital. But slowly, with the help of therapy, medication, a sponsor, and the 12-step programme, I started to rebuild.
I’m 32 now, and I’ve finally learned that I don’t have to constantly earn my right to exist. The world outside the Magic Circle moved slower, but it was gentler. I started writing again – not for praise, but to understand myself. I wrote about trauma, shame, hope. Eventually, I wrote my novel, The Rag Doll Contract, which was published this year.
I’ve spoken on the radio, podcasts, and panels. I work with young people and those struggling with mental health problems. I’ve started committing to advocacy work, refining my learning and writing pamphlets on mental health and articles for Cambridge University Press.
I’ve found a new kind of success – one that doesn’t sound as impressive or pay as much, but that does not cost me my sanity.
Now, when people ask me if I’d go back, I say no. Firstly because, having written a novel and multiple articles about my time in law, no sane lawyer would have me. But more importantly, I’ve built a life I don’t want to escape from. I wake up and feel peace. I’m not constantly chasing the next thing. I’ve found joy in the ordinary: walking dogs, cooking with friends, reading late into the night.
If you’re reading this and feel trapped in the system – in a job, in addiction, in a life that doesn’t feel like yours – it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t need to break to rebuild. But if you already have, it’s not the end.
For me, reaching the bottom was the best thing that could have happened because it forced a reckoning – a total re-evaluation of the life I was living and who it was actually for.
Sometimes, I worry most for the people who never quite reach the bottom. The ones who are just well enough to keep pedalling – but who can never really break free.
The Rag Doll Contract by Dorothy Herson (£13.99, New Generation Publishing) is out now.