Dear reader,

What came out of 2020 that you would bring with you into 2021?

I’d find it easier to answer this question were it framed in the reverse. Chuck face masks out of the window, please. Oh, and the backlog of work that piled up during circuit breaker, and the uncomfortable self-knowledge that I like potato chips as much as I dislike exercise. But metaphorically sitting back on my heels and packing my bags for the new year, I found my mind blank. Is there anything from 2020 I’d bring along? 

I cast my mind back to when I first mooted the idea for Letters of the Law, sometime in February 2016. I was in my second year of law school. I remember being unable to finish certain tutorials without crying, or being unable to finish certain textbook chapters without falling asleep. Most of all, I remember being paralysed by the twin fears that I would never again be who I was (in short, that I had “peaked” at the age of 18) and that I would never ever be who I wished to be (in the words of Letter-writer Tan Li Min, “some kind of Christiane Amanpour-J K Rowling hybrid”). I was lost in the myth of immutability, blind to the reality of hope.

Blind, too, to the reality that hope is a hard-edged thing. I’ll admit I started Letters of the Law with a shade of self-interest, hoping that one of the many law graduates I reached out to would give me a virtual hug and tell me everything would be okay if I kept sailing. But if I were to reach out now to my younger self, five years ago, I would tell her: Hope is not a silver bullet encased in fluffy rainbows. Hope is humility enfolded in grace. Hope wends its gentle arc over your messy moments; it sees you saying the “wrong answer” in class, it sees you proof-reading your submission a thousand times but still failing to spot the one typo before it goes to your boss, it sees you still struggling to master a topic you aren’t immediately interested in. To borrow a phrase from Mary Anne Radmacher, hope is the quiet voice saying, “I’ll try again tomorrow.”

In these words to my younger self, I find the answer to my original question: hope. Chances are, 2020 wasn’t the “best year ever” for you either. Today, alongside this editorial you’re reading, we publish a Letter written by in-house counsel Katherine Tan*, who received devastating news just three weeks before finishing her training contract in the midst of a pandemic. But as she writes at the close of her Letter, “2020 will be a year of crumbling foundations, personal loss, resentment and humiliation. Yet, as you turn the corner into 2021, you will find much to be grateful for: good friends, brilliant colleagues, a supportive family, and a renewed sense of hope.”

As crazy as it sounds, hope did come out of 2020. In August 2020, we finally published Letters of the Law: An Anthology. It took a village to bring this dream to fruition (and to that end, we’re eternally grateful to our core team, army of editorial volunteers and publisher Pagesetters), but hearing how the stories within its pages have brought hope to your lives makes the effort well worth it. In end-2020, we also held an open call for volunteers to help us run this website and our social media in the year ahead. We’re thankful for the many who stepped up to apply, and we warmly welcome Tina, May Ning, Kok Chee, Smrithi, Nithya, and Jing Jie to our editorial team, and Jules, Alexis, and Megan to our publicity team. Together, we’ll continue to bring you stories that matter, so that wherever you are in life, you may be blessed with hope for the journey.

Many things have changed since February 2016. But for as long as there are stories to be told, and hope to be sown, we’ll be here. 

Happy 2021. 

Love,

Grace

Co-founder, Letters of the Law 

*Not her real name.