Lowering the Bar

I have had lots of blog-y things bubbling in my brain and in my life the last month, but am wracked with unimaginable guilt (like, the kind only Catholics understand) every time I even think about allowing myself the luxury of blogging instead of doing another round of practice problems before bed. But I am breaking my silence, perhaps just this once, in the name of therapeutic verbal cleansing and because misery loves company (even the internet kind).

I can remember a time when I believed that I was smart. It’s a distant memory at this point, one that seems like a lifetime ago. A whole huge, beautiful life before law school. It took approximately two days into my legal education to realize how truly mediocre I am. Maybe normal is more apt – as in, not as freakin’ special as my previous bouts with academia had led me to assume. “Squarely on par with the masses” is about how I’d describe myself at this point. And you know what? For awhile now I have been pretty much a-okay with that.

And then I started studying for the Bar Exam, which is nothing more than institutionalized hazing. Right now I hate the entire legal profession as a whole for putting me through this monstrous exercise, especially since I’ve already paid $150k and endured three years of intellectual misery for my fancy (but useless) Juris Doctor degree. And just like every frat pledge with blood-alcohol poisoning in America will tell you, this hazing thing has also made me feel a unique bond with lawyers, even as I simultaneously loath and envy them. They have all been where I am and lived to tell the tale (of passing … eventually) and I desperately want to be one of them.

Do you know why this test is so cruel? Because it is designed to be impossible. Not impossible to pass, but definitely to master. At the exam review course, one lecturer actually told us to find our "highest level of incompetency", and then thank a Higher Power because that means we might pass. No one gets a "good" score; if the test was graded the average person is getting the equivalent of a D-. And asking a room full of competitive, rabid type-A over-achievers to be not just okay, but jubilantly happy, with getting a grade one rung above failure is tantamount to tearing apart the fabric of our souls with rusty garden shears; it is torture.

At the moment I don't even know what my “highest level of incompetency” is or, worse, if I may have already reached it and am therefore screwed beyond all aid. Yet, I have never worked so hard in my life, been so devoid of mirth, felt so helpless and, yes, totally incompetent. I have dreamed bar exam questions the last six out of seven nights (and the other night involved a freak-out stress dream in which everything that possibly could go wrong on my wedding day did, so still in the same category). My mind, it might really be lost. I cannot afford to be deprived of the one organ that’s supposed to carry me through these dark days.

As much as I don’t want to be one of “those people” studying for the bar exam who can't talk about anything but the bar, how much their life sucks and how they’re doomed to fail, etc. the the truth needs to be told: my life (and all the other bar-studiers’) sucks and, as of right now, I very well could be doomed to fail. So help me sweet baby Jesus, if one more person who cannot possibly understand the depths of my self-doubt says to me “don’t worry, you’ll be fine, you’re going to pass” I just might fail on purpose to spite them. (Okay, NOT really – but wouldn’t that somehow be a more satisfying explanation? “Oh no, I didn’t fail because I am a total moron, I was proving a point out of spite”. That way, I’d be both a moron and kind of a ballsy bad-ass ... and, uhhh, sort of a massive tool, as well).

Because, you know what? I might fail. And if I do, it has to not be the end of the world. That is the most reassuring thing I can hear right now. Luckily, The Fiancé has already assured me that if I can’t pass the bar he’s totally cool with knocking me up with his rugby-playing babies for the rest of my life, so there’s no need at all for me to be a big, fancy lawyer. It's pretty much, at least in the fog of the bar exam, the most romantic thing he could possibly say. Let's go ahead and call "Barefoot and Pregnant" my Plan B.

Now back to my study hovel and, every so often, my favorite day-dream that the only bar I ever need discuss again is the kind that will serve me a fine Scotch on the rocks. Please pray for my mortal soul.