hold your breath
May. 23rd, 2003 10:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thatabbygirlso this afternoon, at approximately 6pm (pst), i find out if i passed the bar. in the three months since i took it, i've been feeling amazingly calm and confident about it. but starting last week i had a few scattered dreams of finding out i failed it, and last night i fell into a hole of terror. i knew this calmness and confidence was too good to last.
everyone i know is taking on the confidence for me, assuring me that it is unimaginable that someone like me would not pass such a trivial thing as the california bar exam. while that confidence is nice, it also is making me feel like i absolutely Have to have passed so as to not let all these people down. somehow i've tricked them into thinking i'm competent to do these sorts of things successfully, and i can't be so silly as to shatter that illusion for them.
my other doubts/fears stem from the fact that i've always devoted less time to studying than anyone else i know. i always feel i do enough for me to completely understand the material to my own standards (usually higher than that of the professor), but it's always hard to tell if i've done enough until i get the exam back to see what the professor's standards really were. i'll never forget that in the first disastrous semester of law school, the grades i got were inversely proportional to the degree to which i felt i understood the material in my classes. i just didn't understand how to perform on those kinds of exams.
so while i studied a whole fucking lot for the bar, i also studied way less than most other people i know. ok, every other person i know. i did everything barbri told me too and more. i made up silly acronyms to remember all the duties of professional responsibility. there were flashcards on every flat surface of the apartment. but did i slack too much? did i blow if off by not studying the night before? did i just not take it seriously enough? and there's no way to know until the results come back. i certainly did enough so that i felt i had completely prepared. but yeah, there was more i could have done, too.
i just hope i made the right decisions.
i'm so much looking forward to the law schoo/certification part of being a lawyer being over. i always viewed that time as dues i had to pay before i could get to the really fun part. one of my big flaws is my inability to take super-seriously anything in which i'm not intrinsically interested. i could never do all the reading or go to all the classes for the courses i wasn't enthused about, no matter how many extra hours i spent researching esoteric issues for the courses i loved. this applied in a big way to law school, which i saw as partly helpful for training me how to think, read, and write like a lawyer, but i also saw as a big flaming hoop of stupidity i had to jump through before i could just get on with things. the bar exam was entirely a hoop. it had no interesting characteristics whatsoever.
my job, though, is like the big vat of raw meet that trained lions get after doing their show successfully. (i realize my metaphor has become a bit strained at this point.) it is the reward for getting through all this. and i just want to wallow in it now and have done with all the crap i had to go through to get here.
crossing my fingers. knotting my stomach. three months of confidence means three months of stress compressed into one day.
everyone i know is taking on the confidence for me, assuring me that it is unimaginable that someone like me would not pass such a trivial thing as the california bar exam. while that confidence is nice, it also is making me feel like i absolutely Have to have passed so as to not let all these people down. somehow i've tricked them into thinking i'm competent to do these sorts of things successfully, and i can't be so silly as to shatter that illusion for them.
my other doubts/fears stem from the fact that i've always devoted less time to studying than anyone else i know. i always feel i do enough for me to completely understand the material to my own standards (usually higher than that of the professor), but it's always hard to tell if i've done enough until i get the exam back to see what the professor's standards really were. i'll never forget that in the first disastrous semester of law school, the grades i got were inversely proportional to the degree to which i felt i understood the material in my classes. i just didn't understand how to perform on those kinds of exams.
so while i studied a whole fucking lot for the bar, i also studied way less than most other people i know. ok, every other person i know. i did everything barbri told me too and more. i made up silly acronyms to remember all the duties of professional responsibility. there were flashcards on every flat surface of the apartment. but did i slack too much? did i blow if off by not studying the night before? did i just not take it seriously enough? and there's no way to know until the results come back. i certainly did enough so that i felt i had completely prepared. but yeah, there was more i could have done, too.
i just hope i made the right decisions.
i'm so much looking forward to the law schoo/certification part of being a lawyer being over. i always viewed that time as dues i had to pay before i could get to the really fun part. one of my big flaws is my inability to take super-seriously anything in which i'm not intrinsically interested. i could never do all the reading or go to all the classes for the courses i wasn't enthused about, no matter how many extra hours i spent researching esoteric issues for the courses i loved. this applied in a big way to law school, which i saw as partly helpful for training me how to think, read, and write like a lawyer, but i also saw as a big flaming hoop of stupidity i had to jump through before i could just get on with things. the bar exam was entirely a hoop. it had no interesting characteristics whatsoever.
my job, though, is like the big vat of raw meet that trained lions get after doing their show successfully. (i realize my metaphor has become a bit strained at this point.) it is the reward for getting through all this. and i just want to wallow in it now and have done with all the crap i had to go through to get here.
crossing my fingers. knotting my stomach. three months of confidence means three months of stress compressed into one day.
