On Saturday, 16 March 2025, the mail brought two indicia of identity: My 42nd Missouri Bar card, and a letter from the Internal Revenue Service advising me of income reported under my name and Social Security number in 2017 from a company for which I have never worked and of which I have never heard.

My loss of identity began late that year, as I wound down my law practice and began to surrender myself to a sort of limbo in which the person whom I had been since 1983 yielded to the person into whom I tried to mold myself. I sold the home I had owned for 25 years, stopped taking new clients, yielded the office which I had occupied since 2010, and headed west to a state which would tolerate but never understand my pronunciation of certain revealing words. When the winter rain broke the five-year drought in my adopted home state a few weeks later, I put away my signature Corley Law Firm ice scraper and my long coat. The woman into whom I had morphed would not need them again.

For a couple of years, I took inactive status from the Missouri Bar. I still paid dues, albeit a lower sum. I got the card but no longer had to meet the CLE requirement. I went about my days in my new guise as a nonprofessional, sitting back and letting the California lawyers for whom I did freelance work articulate legal concepts into the air around me as though I had just presented myself for a first-year lecture.

I sought refuge in the writing that had always sustained me, from my elementary days on the sidelines of volleyball games to the dark hours of a Scotch-soaked college dorm life. In my heart, I clung to the definition of “lawyer” (a person with a degree from law school), even though in that gap of time, I could not call myself an “attorney” (someone licensed to practice law). When my employer’s clients treated me in that dismissive way that people use for secretaries, the offhanded manner that secretaries certainly do not themselves deserve, I gritted my teeth. I reminded myself that my worth does not depend on their opinion of me. I quietly drafted their trusts, wills, and powers of attorney. I ghost-wrote letters, because, as Alan White once proclaimed, I do in fact give good letter.

But when I discovered that I could not even do volunteer work while classified as “inactive”, I pulled the plug on reactivation. My annual dues tripled and once again I had to take courses to maintain my prowess, with a few added requirements with which I had to accelerate familiarity but in no way resented. I was, and always would be, a proud member of the Missouri Bar. A lawyer. An attorney. A member of the profession that Shakespeare vowed to sacrifice first before all others.

This evening, I studied the letter explaining the tax fraud that seems to have occurred in my name. I penned a reply, providing the necessary information from which, I assume, the confusion will eventually be resolved. I did an internet search on the company where the false or mistaken reporting apparently occurred. For a dreamy few minutes, the life of an employee there appealed to me. What would I have done there? Would I have lived in a downtown loft, or out in the suburbs, riding the commuter train each morning? Would I have made friends or eaten lunch alone on a park bench in front of the building? What nightlife would await me, when I shut down my computer and sashayed onto the elevator at five o’clock?

Would I luxuriate in that existence? Or would I feel as much at sea in that life as I do in this? Neither fish nor fowl; sitting tucked into the corner of an actual file room, growing ever distant from the days when I confidently walked the marble corridors and carelessly swung open the courtroom doors.

I tucked my new bar card into my wallet and lifted my letter to the IRS from the printer. I remembered a time in my childhood when my mother accidently received several hundred extra dollars from a bank teller. Her hands shook when she counted the bills in the little envelope. Her eyes met mine and a stranger lurked behind them. Years later, I would write these words: Bills were paid in fantasy and full / but she returned the wrong she had been given / lamenting evermore what might have been.

I sealed the envelope on my imaginary existence, affixed a stamp, and tucked it into my small brown purse. Then I went about my evening’s preparations for the coming workday.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®