Status Updates From One L: An Inside Account of...

"I hope it won't break my heart if I don't do well." I had been concentrating on developing that kind of attitude...I'd realized how much I had taken the achievement ethic to heart—I had been so hard on my mistakes and middling performances. A sincere effort was all I owed myself. "I mean, I think that's kind of an ugly desire to feel that you have to do better than everyone else."

Final exams play on a law student's world like some weirdly orbiting moon. They are always in sight; but while they're at a distance, they serve merely to create the tensions which swell daily like tides—to read, to keep pace, to understand. As exams draw close, however, in December and May, their gravitational force starts to shake the whole place to pieces.

"Well, I'm glad if we can prepare our students so that they feel self-confident about performing their professional tasks.
But it doesn't fill me with pride to be part of an institution that has provided so many people with the worst times of their lives. I don't think that's an affirmative thing to say about this law school. I think there has to be something wrong with a place like that."

"Harvard Law School graduates…tell me that 'court held no fear' for them. A lot of them are men who fought in World War II or Korea or Vietnam, and most say that even having had those experiences, they never felt as scared or oppressed as they did when they were law students at Harvard; and that afterwards, by comparison, their anxiety about going into a courtroom for their first time was nothing.”

I was reassured to learn that my bad spell was hardly unique. "I have never seen more manifest anxieties in a group of persons under 'normal' circumstances than is visible in first-year law students," one psychiatrist had written.

I'd seen some more of "my enemy," that funny, indefinite collection of shadowy and unnerving recognitions about myself and what was around me to which I more and more willingly gave that name…I decided that by and large I was a sound creature.

At random instants, I am likely to be stricken with acute feelings of panic, depression, indefinite need, and the pep talks and irony I practice on myself only seem to make it worse.

I am a law student in my first year at the law, and there are many moments when I am simply a mess.

It is Monday morning, and when I walk into the central building, I can feel my stomach clench...I will assume that I am somewhat less intelligent than anyone around me. At most moments I'll suspect that the privilege I enjoy was conferred as some kind of peculiar hoax. I will be certain that no matter what I do, I will not do it well enough; and when I fail, I know that I will burn with shame…

I had never before failed an exam. That it would have no bearing on my grade did not matter. I had been confirmed in my suspicion that I was a ludicrous, miserable, unworthy failure. The disgrace turned inside me like a fierce, fiery wheel. The world as I saw it was peopled only by those whom I'd disappointed and hurt.

But when I opened my blue book some kind of emotional sluice opened in me as well…How, how, I thought, with a quick and stricken wonder, could I have returned to this low point of having to prove my-self?

I had finally realized that there had been a worthwhile job to do and that I had done it badly. I had mocked what I should have cared about…And there was no way out. No professors to blame, no institutions. This time I'd been the entire source of my own humiliation and there was nothing to do but drink, and wait until I could forget it.

I see now that during that period last fall, I was learning all about disgrace. I was suffering a broad variety of shames and embarrassments-over failure, at feeling a child, over losing control…In looking back at all those shamed feelings, I see much of the pain as crazy and exaggerated and unnecessary.