Being a self-represented litigant is, I have to say, one of the most stressful and loneliest experiences I think anyone can go through. It’s not just the stigma, though that’s real enough—the bias, the assumptions, the way people’s faces shift when you explain why you’re in court without a lawyer. It’s that the experience itself is fundamentally isolating in ways that are hard to convey to anyone who hasn’t lived it.
If your lawsuit involves a condo, the loneliness has a particular flavor. You will likely be hated by the other owners. Not in a dramatic, confrontational way necessarily, but in the quiet, everyday way of people who see you in the hallway and look away. They won’t want to understand your position. They’re busy with their own lives, their own problems, and yours is not something they have room for. Technically, if the condo loses, it affects them financially. But human psychology doesn’t work on technicalities. Most of them are secretly hoping you lose so they don’t have to pay. They won’t say it, but you’ll feel it. You’ll feel it every time you pass someone in the elevator who used to say hello.
Friends and family are their own kind of difficult. Even the supportive ones don’t know how to help you. If you’re lucky, they might be willing to listen while you talk through your problems. But the reality is that litigation is really boring stuff to anyone not living inside it. The deadlines, the procedural steps, the arcane disputes over document production—it’s the kind of detail that glazes eyes within minutes. Your loved ones want to be there for you, but they don’t know what to do with you. They can’t strategize with you. They can’t review your factum. They can’t sit beside you in court. They can make you tea and tell you it’ll be okay, and that matters more than they know, but it doesn’t change the fundamental aloneness of the work.
Then there are the people inside the system itself. Along the way, you will encounter moody office clerks who treat your confusion as inconvenience. You will face sharp conduct from lawyers who know exactly how to make you feel small. You will experience disrespect simply for being lost, for not knowing rules that were never designed for you to understand. Some of this is intentional; most of it isn’t. It’s just what happens when you move through a world built for insiders as someone on the outside. Every interaction carries an extra layer of friction, an extra reminder that you don’t quite belong here.
What makes it loneliest, I think, is that no one else can carry it with you. A lawyer carries the weight of a case for their client. They absorb the stress, manage the strategy, handle the sharp edges of opposing counsel. When you’re a self-rep, all of that is yours. Every motion, every deadline, every ambiguous email from the other side—it all lands on you. There’s no one to pass it to. No one to say, “Here, you deal with this.” The case lives in your head constantly, not because you lack discipline, but because there’s no one else for it to live in.
No one understands the self-rep experience until they’ve experienced it themselves. And they don’t understand how difficult it really is because it’s not widely talked about.
And yet, there are moments when the loneliness shifts into something else. Something quieter, but not entirely bad. You learn to rely on yourself in ways you never expected. You develop a kind of stubborn self-trust. You stop waiting for someone to validate your position because you realize no one is coming to do that. You become your own strategist, your own researcher, your own emotional support system. It’s not the same as having a team behind you. But it’s something.
I thought about this while writing Condozilla. Clara walks through her building feeling eyes on her, knowing what people are thinking, knowing they’re hoping she’ll just go away. She talks to friends who want to help but can’t, friends who listen politely and then change the subject. She stands across from clerks who sigh at her questions and lawyers who speak to her like she’s dumb for not hiring a lawyer. But she keeps going. Not because it’s easy, but because the alternative is walking away from the only person fighting for her mother’s case—and that person is her.
If you’ve ever felt completely alone in a fight that only you seem to care about, Clara’s story is for you. Condozilla is available now.
Leave a Reply